She went to the University of Michigan for graduate study in mechanical engineering, earning a master's degree in 1994 and completing her Ph.D. in 1997.
[1] Her dissertation was Optimal design of compliant mechanisms,[2] supervised by Noboru Kikuchi and Sridhar Kota.
[4] In 2020, she was named to the Leighton Riess Chair in Engineering and became the director of the Penn State Center for Biodevices.
[5] She was named as head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, succeeding Karen Thole, in 2021.
[7] In 2021, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers gave her their Adaptive Structures and Material Systems Award.