[2] Growing up, Willman attended Bettendorf High School where she served as class vice president[3] and newspaper journalist.

[6] During her third year at the Mayo Clinic, she stepped away from the school for six months to join the National Institutes of Health’s medical science training program.

[7] During her early tenure at the UNM School of Medicine, Willman focused her research on developing cancer diagnostics and therapies by using genomic, next generation sequencing and computational technologies to identify cancer-causing DNA mutations.

[11] In these roles, she began to research and study Acute lymphoblastic leukemia in Hispanic and Native American children who were not responding to standard therapies.

[12] In 2013, she was honored with the "La Estrella" award from the YWCA for her "distinguished medical career and her leadership role in the field of cancer research.