[4] In 1957 she completed her doctoral work in botany at the University of Michigan; her thesis titled "A Revision of the Genus Halimeda (order Siphonales)" was published in 1959.

[5] As a graduate student, she did research at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

"[8] Though landlocked Ohio was not the ideal place to be a marine biologist,[9] she continued her work on coral reef algae,[10] especially in the genus Halimeda.

She secured funding from the U.S. Office of Naval Research and from the National Science Foundation.

In 1976, she traveled to Enewetak Atoll to find Halimeda in a nuclear bomb crater.