She received her PhD from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1980, where her doctoral advisor was William Chinowsky[1] and her thesis was titled Jets in e+e− Annihilation.
In her thesis, Cooper studied the properties of jets created by electron-positron annihilation using data collected by the Mark I detector at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory's SPEAR collider.
[2] Cooper held postdoctoral positions at DESY from 1980 to 1982 and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory from 1982 to 1986, including spokesman of Crystal Ball experiment.
She was on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1986 to 1989, starting in near-IR astronomy to look for brown dwarfs as dark matter and was on the staff of the Max Planck Institute in Munich from 1989 to 1996, including founder and spokesman of the CRESST experiment to search for WIMP dark matter.
[4] She said that she had multiple inspirations in 19th century German mathematician David Hilbert, also she released a book: "A review of Two Photons Physics".