 In 1997-1998 she studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel with funding from a Fulbright fellowship, a year that coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.She returned to Notre Dame to begin her Ph.D. studies in the Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity area, where she also minored in Syriac exegesis and liturgical theology.Her dissertation on the Qumran Hodayot (2003) was later published as a series of articles.