Molly received a B.A. in Mathematics from Princeton University and a Ph.D. from the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago. Her postdoc was in the Statistics Dept. of the University of Oxford, and was followed by a two year stint as a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Before moving to Columbia University, she was a faculty member at the University of Chicago (where she was also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Early Career Scientist) as well as, briefly, at Brown University.