She studied at Harvard, concentrating on mathematics, and graduated magna cum laude in 1964. From Harvard she moved on to Caltech receiving an M.Sc. in 1966 and Ph.D. in 1968. She became an associate professor of physics at Illinois in 1974, later becoming a full professor. Her research was in high-energy physics, particularly the force binding nuclear particles to quarks. Her career in research on theoretical high-energy focused on four things: Regge pole theory, phenomenological models of photomeson production, jet calculus in quantum chromodynamics (QCD), and use of Grassmann coordinates to describe internal symmetries. She took a sabbatical in 1981–1982 to work at CERN, becoming a fellow of the American Physical Society in the division of particles and fields in 1982. She became director of the university's Education Research Laboratory in the year 1992, remaining at the University of Illinois for her whole career and publishing a total of 64 papers based on her research.