[4] She completed her bachelor's degree, majoring in physics, at the University of Toronto prior to graduate studies at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
[4] In 1986, while working for the summer as part of the Palomar Sky Survey, Wilson discovered a comet on August 5 while examining a photographic plate of a field of faint galaxies.
[3] [4][5] Wilson attended the California Institute of Technology where she studied the interstellar medium in the galaxy M33 with her research advisor Nick Scoville.
[10] On September 9, 2013, Wilson was inducted to the Royal Society of Canada for her accomplishments as a Fellow of the Academy of Science.
[8] She was also awarded a Killam Research Fellowship for her work on dense gas star formation in galaxies using archival data from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array.