She changed her name to Linda Brown Buck after getting married to Roger Brent. She studied psychology and microbiology at the University of Washington in Seattle, graduating in 1975. Buck received her Ph.D. in immunology from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas in 1980. She researched more at Columbia after her studies in doctoral research . There, she met Richard Axel. They worked together from 1984 to 1991, when Buck left New York for a teaching job. They researched primarily on the genetic and cellular mechanisms relating to an organism’s sense of smell. When she left New York, Buck worked at Harvard until 2002. She then joined the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. 