 She received her Doctor of Philosophy in oceanography from the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University in 2006 with a dissertation titled "The Role and Evolution of Superoxide Dismutases in Algae".Later Wolfe-Simon was a NASA research fellow in residence at the US Geological Survey and a member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.Wolfe-Simon's research focuses on evolutionary microbiology and exotic metabolic pathways.