[2][3] She moved to Melbourne as a child, and was inspired to study physics at a young age by her teachers at Parkdale Primary and Mentone Girls' Grammar School.

[4] In 2010 she earned a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oxford, where she worked in the John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science.

[4] Her DPhil was part of the PAMELA project, focussed on designing non-scaling fixed-field alternating gradient accelerators for charged particle therapy[5] supervised by Kenneth Peach.

[1] In 2010 Sheehy was awarded a Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 fellowship in high intensity hadron accelerators.

Working with Emmanuel Tsesmelis, during her DPhil Sheehy designed a particle physics outreach show Accelerate!