Alter began attending school at Tel Aviv University in Israel and graduated in October 1989 magna cum laude with her bachelors of science in physics.
[3] After receiving her undergraduate degree, she began pursuing her Ph.D. in applied physics at the Stanford University in California, USA.
She completed her Ph.D. with a thesis on “Impossibility of Determining the Quantum Wavefunction of a Single System and a Fundamental Limit to External Force Detection," under the mentorship of Yoshihisa Yamamoto in January of 1999[4] and then moved onto a postdoctoral fellowship in genetics, remaining at Stanford.
[5] Alter moved to the University of Utah in 2010, where she joined the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute as a USTAR Associate Professor of Bioengineering.
[6] Alter has one published book named Quantum Measurement of a Single System,[7] co-authored with Yamamoto, and another book in preparation, Genomic Signal Processing: Discovery of Principles of Nature from Matrix and Tensor Modeling of Large-Scale Molecular Biological Data.