Growing up, her father tutored her in Newtonian physics, creating complex pulley-related problems for her to solve, and taught her the principles of programming through Fortran punch cards.
During her undergraduate studies, she completed a summer internship at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where she worked with Ernie Mehler and Harel Weinstein.
Her PhD work used X-ray crystallography to determine the structure and mechanism of the two translation initiation GTPases essential for assembling an 80S ribosome primed for protein synthesis.
[1] After receiving her doctorate, she worked at the University of California, San Francisco, from 2003 to 2009 as a Damon Runyon and Burroughs Wellcome Career Award postdoctoral fellow with Ron Vale.
[4] In her spare time, she enjoys classical music, and has noted that while in graduate school in New York City she often attended concerts or opera performances in between running her experiments.
[2] When a colleague leaves her lab, Roll-Mecak is known to give them a daruma doll, a lucky charm in Japanese folk culture that comes with its eyes unpainted.