[1] Woolley received her Bachelors of Arts in 1991 from University of Colorado Boulder, studying biology and psychology.
She then attended the University of Washington School of Medicine, where she received her PhD in 1999 in neurobiology and Behavior in the laboratory of Edwin Rubel.
She also noted that these finches can regenerate auditory hair cells, which can restore hearing within eight weeks following damage to them.
[5][6] For her postdoctoral fellowship, she stayed at the University of Washington, where she performed work to understand the avian auditory midbrain (or the mesencephalicus lateralis, dorsalis, MLd) of zebra finches, which processes multiple parallel inputs and conveys that processed information to the forebrain.
She found that the majority of auditory midbrain neurons were able to consistently and precisely tune in to finch vocalizations, while they exhibited a high degree of variability in response to generic noise.