She was the dean of the School of Natural Sciences, Mathematics, and Engineering at California State University, Bakersfield.
She won the George Pólya Award and is the co-author of the book Discovering Discrete Dynamical Systems.
[1] She then spent two years with the Peace Corps teaching mathematics in Cameroon before returning to the US for graduate study.
[2] She completed her Ph.D. in 1994 at the University of Maryland, College Park; her dissertation, On the Existence and Consequences of Exotic Cocycles, was supervised by Nelson G.
[2] In 2017, Madden, Johnson, and their co-author Ayşe Şahin published the textbook Discovering Discrete Dynamical Systems through the Mathematical Association of America.