Alexandra is a teaching assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience T the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. She earned a B.S. in biology from the Commonwealth Honors College and College of Natural Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2011 and a Ph.D. from the School of Biological Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

As a graduate student in the lab of Dr. Stephen Shea, she studied the neural circuits that support the integration of auditory and olfactory cues, which are important for maternal retrieval behavior in mice. She became interested in motivated behavior while observing the dramatic shifts in neural activity and behavior maternal mice exhibit. She came to UNC as a postdoc in Dr. Zoe McElligott's lab, where she studied noradrenergic signaling and mechanisms of plasticity in the locus coeruleus (LC) and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) that occur during opioid withdrawal.