Virginia W. Noonburg gained a BA in Mathematics from Cornell University, before spending four years as a computer programmer at the knolls Atomic Power Lab near Schenectady, New York. After returning to Cornell and earning a PhD in Mathematics, she taught first at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee and then at the University of Hartford in West Hartford, Connecticut (from which she has recently retired as professor emerita). During the late 1980s she twice taught as a visiting professor at Cornell, and also earned a Cornell MS Eng degree in Computer Science.