Educated in the US, Germany, Taiwan, and Canada, she has worked in the Netherlands and France, where she is a director of research for the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (Inria), affiliated with the Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Sciences du Numérique (LISN) at Paris-Saclay University.
After secondary school at Stephen Decatur High School (Maryland) in the US and the Limes-Gymnasium [de] in Welzheim, Germany, Isenberg earned a diplom (German equivalent of a master's degree) in engineering in 2004 from Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg in Germany; her studies for this degree also included a term as a research intern at National Taiwan University.
[1] She went to the University of Calgary in Canada for doctoral study in computer science; her 2009 dissertation, Co-located Collaborative Information Visualization, was supervised by Sheelagh Carpendale.
[1][2] After a stint as a visiting researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, Isenberg began working for Inria in 2010.
[1] Isenberg was named to the IEEE Visualization Academy in 2023.