Paula Yurkanis Bruice" was raised primarily in Massachusetts, Germany, and Switzerland and was graduated from the Girls' Latin School in Boston. She received an A.B. from Mount Holyoke College and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Virginia. She received an NIH postdoctoral fellowship for study in biochemistry at the University of Virginia Medical School, and she held a postdoctoral appointment in the Department of Pharmacology at Yale Medical School. She is a member of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she has received the Associated Students Teacher