at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in ecology, evolution and conservation biology, involving research on seismo-acoustic communication of planthoppers.

Based on five years of experiments with captive elephants in the United States, Zimbabwe and India,[3] she earned her Ph.D. in ecology at the University of California, Davis in 2000.

[4] She has subsequently worked at Stanford University Medical School as postdoctoral fellow,[5] as assistant professor and (currently) as instructor at its Department of Otolaryngology.

[4] In October 2002, together with Timothy Rodwell, she founded Utopia Scientific, a non-profit corporation in San Diego that is dedicated to science and public health education.

The book The elephant scientist, which she wrote together with Donna M. Jackson and for which she and her husband Timothy C. Rodwell provided the photographs, received the Sibert Medal in 2012.