Emily received her Masters and PhD from the University of Sydney in Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics. She was an EMBO postdoctoral fellow at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory–European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Cambridge, UK. There, she studied the regulatory evolution of mammalian tissues. In 2016, She returned to Australia as an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Fellow to the University of Queensland where she worked on genomic control during development.

Emily is part of UNSW and the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute. Her research seeks to tie together genetic and molecular understanding to decipher the rules controlling cell and trait diversity. She uses new cross-disciplinary approaches integrating big data with in vivo experiments. Her work leverages the power of comparative genomics to understand how traits are encoded in our genomes and how regulatory systems are disrupted in disease.