Dawn joined the Thoracic Oncology Laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow from Stanford University where she studied the Wnt pathway in prostate cancer. At Stanford, Dawn won the 2006 NIH Ruth L. Kirschenstein National Research Service Award and her postdoctoral studies here in the Thoracic Oncology Laboratory were under the auspices of another 2006 NIH National Research Service Award. Her project here was to study the roles of the Frizzled receptors in the Wnt pathway and to understand their involvement in lung cancer.
Prior to her work at Stanford, she completed her Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of California at Santa Barbara. As part of her doctoral work, Dawn studied structure-function analysis of the vesicular acetylcholine transporter (VAChT) and developed an enzymatic assay for detection of a date rape drug, GHB. While in graduate school, she was the recipient of a number of honors including a Department of Chemistry Award for Research Achievement in 2001, a Penn Scholarship in 2001, and a Baker Award for Outstanding Graduate Research in 2004.