As a child, she went to a gymnasium in Basel and then studied at the University of Basel, graduating in 1982 with a diploma directed by Heinz Huber "On finiteness of the isometry group of a compact negatively curved Riemannian manifold".
In 1995 she received her habilitation from the University of Bonn, where she worked at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics since 1989 until 1995.