 She graduated from Heidelberg University in 1988, and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Cornell University in 1990 with a dissertation on ergodic theory supervised by Rick Durrett.She became a mathematics professor at the University of Minnesota in 1996, and moved to the Rochester campus of the same university in 2008 before returning to the Twin Cities campus in 2013.She has also held faculty positions at the University of Southern California, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and University of California, Davis

Before moving to the University of Minnesota Rochester in 2008, she was Professor and Head of the Ecology, Evolution and Behavior department at the Twin Cities campus.