[1][2] Young graduated from Cumberland College in 1981, and completed a PhD in mathematics, specializing in algebraic topology, at the University of Virginia in 1984.
[3] Her dissertation, Branched coverings arising from group actions, was supervised by Robert Evert Stong.
[3][4] After postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study, she returned to Cumberland as a faculty member from 1986 to 1990.
[2][3] Young won the 1997 Halmstad Prize and 1998 Edward A. Lew Award of the Society of Actuaries for her work with Frees, King, Rosenberg, and Lai on mathematical models for the long-term behavior of the US Social Security system.
[2][5][6] Other topics in her research have included comparisons of least squares versus entropy-based methods for actuarial prediction, and the applications of stochastic control to portfolio optimization problems involving insurance policies.