Karen Maxwell completed her Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics at the University of Toronto, where she worked in Dr. Marvin Gold’s lab studying the assembly of bacteriophage lambda. Her postdoctoral work was done at the Ontario Centre for Structural Genomics where she led a project focused on phage structural genomics. She then moved on to a Research Associate position at the Donnelly Centre, University of Toronto before starting in the Department of Biochemistry as an Assistant Professor in 2016.