Kelly Stecker studied biochemistry at the University of Washington and worked in the plant biotech industry for several years before obtaining her PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kelly was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for her PhD work studying plant proteomics and plant signal transduction events in response to acute water loss. In 2016 she moved to the Netherlands for a post-doc in the Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry & Proteomics (BMSP) group at Utrecht University and began her work on protein regulation and protein expression in cancer, with a specific focus on signal transduction events that regulate tumor-immune cell interactions.  She became an Assistant Professor in the BMSP group in 2021.