[1] After spending a year in San Jose, California, she realized that the educational system in the US would allow her to learn about multiple topics, instead of focusing on a single discipline.
Finding this attractive, she enrolled at San Jose State University, initially as a pre-med student but then switching to biochemistry.
[1] After a year at a small biotechnology company, she attended graduate school at the University of California, San Francisco, where she studied the structure of clathrin in the laboratory of Frances Brodsky.
In her postdoctoral work she established a link between the adenomatous polyposis coli (APC) tumor suppressor and cell movement mediated by the cytoskeleton.
[6][7] She discovered that loss of APC leads directly to chromosome instability and polyploidy by affecting the spindle checkpoint.