She won the Harry S. Truman Scholarship for the State of California, which enabled her to move on to Spelman College, where she earned a bachelor's degree in political science.

In addition, Skinner is a Distinguished Fellow at CyLab, a research center in the College of Engineering, and holds courtesy faculty positions at CMU's Heinz College, the Institute for Software Research, an academic department in the School of Computer Science, and in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences.

[6] At Stanford University's Hoover Institution, Skinner is the W. Glenn Campbell Research Fellow and a member of the Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy.

Skinner drew international attention in April 2019 for stating at a foreign policy forum that the U.S. competition with China would be especially bitter, because unlike the Cold War with the Soviet Union which is "a fight within the Western family", “it’s the first time that we will have a great-power competitor that is not Caucasian".

[16][17] Some critics viewed these remarks as a new version of Samuel P. Huntington's clash of civilizations thesis or as bordering on racism.

[19] In 2023, Skinner contributed to the State Department chapter in the ninth edition of Heritage Foundation's book Mandate for Leadership, which provides the policy agenda for Project 2025.