Northup was an undergraduate student at West Virginia University, where she studied political science. She moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for graduate studies, where she earned a Masters of Library Science in 1972. Northup moved to the University of New Mexico, where she earned a Masters degree in biology in 1988. She remained at the University of New Mexico for her doctoral research, where she studied the geomicrobiology of caves.