Hartge completed a bachelor's degree at Radcliffe College and a M.A. in economics at Yale University.[1] She was a research associate for two years at the Boston Children's Hospital.[1] She was hired by Joseph F. Fraumeni Jr. and Robert Hoover to join the National Cancer Institute (NCI).[1] She completed a Sc.M. (1976) and Sc.D. (1983) at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.[1] Her dissertation was titled A case-control study of bladder cancer.[2] During the mid-1980s into the 1990s, her supervisor, Fraumeni Jr., allowed Hartge, and her colleagues Debra T. Silverman and Shelia Hoar Zahm to all work part-time so they could raise families.[3]
Hartge made methodological contributions to epidemiology, from the first application of random digit dialing in the 1970s to conducting genome-wide association studies (GWAS) today.[4] During her tenure at National Institutes of Health (NIH), she carried out research on ovarian cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, melanoma and other malignancies.[4] In 1996, she became deputy director of the NCI epidemiology and biostatistics program in the division of cancer epidemiology and genetics (DCEG) .[4] She was an architect of international, interdisciplinary, multi-institutional consortia in cancer epidemiology, including InterLymph and the NCI Cohort Consortium.[4] Hartge retired in 2013 after 36 years with NCI.[4]
