Eckert was a student of mathematics at LMU Munich in Germany, and a student of philosophy at the Munich School of Philosophy, a small Jesuit school in Munich.[2] After earning a bachelor's degree from the Munich School of Philosophy,[1] and a master's degree in Applied Artificial Intelligence from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland,[2] in 1990,[3] she completed a PhD in 1997 at the Open University.[2] Her dissertation, Intelligent support for knitwear design, was jointly supervised by Helmut Bez, Jeff Johnson, and Nigel Cross.[4]
After continuing as a researcher at the Open University[3] and then working for approximately ten years at the University of Cambridge, in the university's Engineering Design Centre, she became a senior lecturer at the Open University in 2008. She was promoted to professor in 2013.[2]
