[1] After "a rough start" in a required calculus course as an undergraduate at the University of Puget Sound, Kelley became a mathematics major at the encouragement of faculty member Rob Beezer,[2] and took advantages of opportunities there including study abroad in Hungary through the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics.
[2][3] After graduating in 1999, and spending a year as a research assistant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, she went to the University of Cambridge in England for Part III of the Mathematical Tripos, a one-year master's-level course.
She returned to the US for continued graduate study at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, earning a master's degree in 2003 and completing her Ph.D. in 2006.
[3] Her doctoral dissertation, Pseudocodewords, Expander Graphs and the Algebraic Construction of Low-Density Parity-Check Codes, was supervised by Joachim Rosenthal.
[3][4] She became a postdoctoral researcher at the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences in Toronto, Canada, and VIGRE Arnold Ross Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University, before landing a regular-rank faculty position as assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 2007 (on leave for an initial year to complete her postdoctoral work at Ohio State).