In 1986–1987, she started working at Upjohn Pharmaceuticals in Kalamazoo, Michigan in order to develop production methods to ensure biological materials manufactured using human blood products were free of contamination from HIV-1. In 1992 she completed a joint PhD program in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at George Washington University.[9] Because of her previous work experience, her PhD thesis was titled “Negative Regulation of HIV Expression in Monocytes” She was a Postdoctoral Scholar in Molecular Virology at the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity, National Cancer Institute under Dr. David Derse.