Dr. Willis received her B.Sc. in Biochemistry from the University of Victoria and Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology in the lab of Dr. Chris Whitfield at the University of Guelph. She did her postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Mark Nitz in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Toronto, where she received the prestigious Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship. In 2019, she started as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta, where she is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology.