[4][5] Green studied civil engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles and graduated magna cum laude in 1992.

She received a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering in 2001 from University of California, Berkeley with a thesis on theoretical ecology, supervised by William E. Kastenberg and John Harte.

She was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow working with Mark Westoby and Alan Hastings on the application of genomic tools to microbial biogeography.

Green’s academic career focused on theoretical ecology[6] and microbial biogeography in environments including soils,[7][8] the phyllosphere,[9] and the atmosphere.

[11][12] In 2015 Green co-founded Phylagen, Inc., a biotech company specializing in digitizing the indoor microbiome for health and safety.