She went to the University of California, Berkeley for graduate study in computer science, earning a master's degree in 1981 and completing her Ph.D. in 1983.
[2] Her doctoral dissertation, Inferring Sequences Produced by Pseudo-Random Number Generators, was supervised by Manuel Blum.
[3] After completing her doctorate, Boyar returned to the University of Chicago as an assistant professor of computer science in 1983.
[2] Her students there included Danish computer scientist Carsten Lund, jointly advised with Lance Fortnow and László Babai.
She is married to Kim Skak Larsen, also a professor of computer science at the University of Southern Denmark, and is a Danish citizen.