Becker earned her diploma under Werner Nahm at the University of Bonn where she also received her doctorate in 1994 with a dissertation titled, Strings, black holes and conformal field theory. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and then a senior research fellow at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) with John Henry Schwarz. She became an assistant professor at the University of Utah before moving to Texas A&M University in 2005.