Reineke earned her bachelors degree at University of Wisconsin&ndash;Eau Claire. She moved to Arizona State University for her graduate studies and earned a masters degree in 1998. Reineke was a PhD student at the University of Michigan, where she was supervised by Michael O'Keeffe and Omar M. Yaghi. She was awarded the Wirt and Mary Cornell Prize for Outstanding Graduate Research. Reineke joined the California Institute of Technology as an National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow in 2000.