Tiffany studied Biology at Brown University, before attending the University of California San Francisco for her graduate work. While at UCSF in Dr. Richard Locksley's lab she studied how chitin promotes inflammation. For her postdoctoral fellowship she was in Herbert “Skip” Virgin’s lab at Washington University, where she identified a role for parasite co-infection in herpesvirus reactivation and latency. She was the recipient of the Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellowship while in Dr. Virgin's lab. In April of 2015 Tiffany joined the Departments of Immunology and Microbiology as an Endowed Scholar at UTSW.