She is a professor of computer science and (by courtesy) of mathematics at Tufts University.
[2] She started her studies at Yale University at age 16,[1] and graduated in 1987 with a bachelor's degree in mathematics, also winning the university's deForest Prize as the top graduate in mathematics that year.
[3] She went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for graduate study in applied mathematics, completing her Ph.D. in 1993 with a dissertation On Local Representations of Graphs and Networks supervised by Daniel Kleitman.
[3] In 2020 she became the principal investigator for the newly formed Tufts Center for Transdisciplinary Research in Principles Of Data Science (T-TRIPODS).
[5] In 2020, the Education Committee of the Computing Research Association gave Cowen their CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award, for her work with undergraduates at Tufts on interdisciplinary methods in computational biology and data science.