I spent most of my childhood growing up in rural areas in Texas and Nebraska. I earned my B.A. in Psychology from the University of Nebraska, and my PhD in Clinical Psychology at Oklahoma State University. I completed a pre-doctoral clinical internship in Boston at the National Center for PTSD-VAHSC, including rotations in the Behavioral Sciences Division and Women Health Sciences Division for PTSD treatment, and Acute Inpatient Psychiatry. I completed  my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and then joined the faculty at Miami University. 

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I came to Miami University in 2000 and established the laboratory that year. My first study at Miami used a prospective design to examine risk factors for sexual revictimization among college women. During that study, we documented, for the first time, that risk perception deficits increased vulnerability for later sexual assault.

In 1993, I started my Ph.D. program in Clinical Psychology at Oklahoma State University with Trish Long, Ph.D., my mentor. We studied the long-term impact of childhood sexual abuse on adult women. We published one of the first literature reviews examining the issue of sexual revictimization. Additional empirical papers were some of the first studies to document the phenomenon of revictimization among college women. 

After I finished my internship in Boston in 1999, I moved to St. Louis to work with Patti Resick, Ph.D., at the Center for Trauma Recovery at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. As a post-doctoral fellow at the Center,  I conducted research and psychotherapy with victims of rape and other crimes, as well as contributed to clinical research studies testing the efficacy of Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), a brand of cognitive-behavioral therapy designed to treat PTSD. Patti and I published a case study describing how CPT can be used with patients who experienced complex trauma and PTSD.