From a young age, Moens worked in the laboratory of her father, Peter Moens, a biology professor at York University; she would prepare agar plates and solutions and later performed electron microscopy.
Her research, supervised by Janet Rossant, concerned the development of mouses; she earned her PhD in 1993.
[1][2] Moens became a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Charles Kimmel [Wikidata] at the University of Oregon,[3] where her work involved searching for genes that controlled the development of hindbrain neurons.
[4] In 1998, she joined the faculty at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, within their Basic Sciences Division.
[5] She runs a laboratory that studies the development of the vertebrate brain, using the zebrafish as a model organism.