[2][3][4] She is most known for her work in acoustic communication and song production in courting Drosophila fruit flies.
She was a Burchards scholar in the humanities and won the John L. Asinari prize for outstanding undergraduate research in the life sciences.
She then received her PhD in Neuroscience from Stanford University, working with Thomas Schwarz and Richard Scheller.
Her thesis research centered on mechanisms of vesicle trafficking to cell membranes.
She did postdoctoral work in systems neuroscience with Gilles Laurent at Caltech as a Helen Hay Whitney fellow stereotypy in the central brain of Drosophila, in a region of the brain important for learning in memory.