 Her supervisor was Gabrielle Donnay.During her PhD work, she attended a talk by U.S. mathematician Herbert Hauptman, who would later win the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and who studied directed methods for determining crystal structures.After being awarded her PhD in 1976, Fortier worked on biophysics for six years at the Medical Foundation of Buffalo, Inc., a private institute where Hauptman was research director (now the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute).