She earned her Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin in 2005 and her M.S. and B.S. in Mathematics from OSU. She is PI on OSU's 2011 and 2015 National Science Foundation (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) grants for High Performance Compute clusters for multidisciplinary computational and data-intensive research. She is also co-PI on Oklahoma's NSF Campus Cyberinfrastructure - Network Infrastructure and Engineering CC-NIE grant, "OneOklahoma Friction Free Network" (OFFN), a collaboration among OSU, OU, Langston University and the Tandy Supercomputing Center of the Oklahoma Innovation Institute.
Dr. Brunson is also a member of the Campus Research Computing Consortium (CaRC) Council, is an at-large board member for the ACM SIGHPC Education chapter, serves on Internet2’s External Advisory Group on Researcher Engagement, the Cyberinfrastructure program committee for the Great Plains Network, and Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s Bridges external advisory board.