[4] Zeller grew up in Glenview, Illinois,[5] and took the nickname "Sam" after her grandfather, because of their mutual baldness when she was an infant.
[4] She joined the Glenbrook Academy of International Studies at Glenbrook South High School, and preferred humanities to mathematics and the sciences until being inspired by a senior-year physics teacher, John Lewis, who took her class on a field trip to Fermilab.
[5][4] She majored in physics at Northwestern University,[6] and already as an undergraduate began working at Fermilab, helping with the assembly of detectors there.
[7] She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Pi Sigma in 1994,[6] and completed her Ph.D. at Northwestern in 2002, with doctoral research on neutrino-nucleon scattering in the NuTeV experiment at Fermilab, directed by Heidi Schellman[6][8][7] and also mentored by Kevin McFarland at the University of Rochester.
[1] In 2021, she was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, after a nomination from the APS Division of Particles and Fields, "for outstanding contributions and intellectual leadership in developing the understanding of GeV neutrino interactions and their importance for past, current, and future neutrino oscillation experiments".