I was born in Glasgow, Scotland and got both by Bachelors and Doctoral degree from the University of Glasgow.
I moved to the US in 1993 to help start a research group at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana before joining the Lockheed Martin Solar Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, California in 1996.
In 2003, I joined the faculty ar Rice to start a new solar research group (http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~solar/
In 2000, I began Solar Week as a daughter to the Yohkoh Public Outreach Project (YPOP) to try to encourage more girls to consider science as a career option.