She completed her Ph.D. in biochemistry from University of California, Berkeley in the laboratory of Bruce Ames in 1988, where she discovered that OxyR senses hydrogen peroxide stress in Escherichia coli oxidation response.

She trained briefly as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute with Sankar Adhya in 1989 and at Harvard Medical School with Frederick M. Ausubel from 1989 to 1991.

[2] She joined the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at NIH in 1991 and is currently head of the Section on Environmental Gene Regulation.

[3][4] An early focus of her research was the study of redox-sensitive transcription factors and the bacterial and yeast responses to oxidative stress.

She discovered that the activity of the Escherichia coli transcription factor OxyR, now a paradigm for other redox-sensitive proteins, is regulated by reversible disulfide bond formation and elucidated how disulfide bond formation controls the nuclear localization of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae transcription factor Yap1.