Dr. Hill has a background in Biology and Microbiology. Her PhD research was in baculovirus (insect virus) pathogenesis. She did postdoctoral work in plant virology (geminivirus movement) and molecular parasitology (Trypanosoma cruzi pathogenesis) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Dr. Hill's next step was to work as a research scientist at the National Research Council of Canada Plant Biotechnology Institute, developing cpnDB and cpn60 sequence-based methods for microbial ecology and diagnostics. She became a faculty member in Veterinary Microbiology at the University of Saskatchewan in January 2006.