Holly Tuten received a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2006. In the Summer of 2006 she hiked the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain. She entered a Master's program at Clemson University in the Fall of 2007. She is currently matriculating at Clemson University in a PhD program in Entomology. Her doctoral research is on the ecology of mosquitoes in zoological parks. In 2008 she was the recipient of the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship.