[5] As a student, she began her work in control theory with a summer internship at Honeywell involving thermostats.
[4] She graduated summa cum laude, with a minor in French, in 1989,[6] and completed her Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley in 1994.
Her dissertation, Exterior differential systems and nonholonomic motion planning, was supervised by Shankar Sastry,[6][7] and concerned the problem of parallel parking for a vehicle towing multiple trailers.
At Michigan, she has also directed the Ground Robotics Reliability Center from 2009 to 2011 and served as associate dean for research from 2014 to 2016.
[6] She was appointed assistant director for engineering at the National Science Foundation in 2017, retaining her professor position at the University of Michigan.