Joseph graduated from
Hiram College in 1976 with an interdisciplinary major in
ecology.[2]
She earned her Ph.D. in 1981 at
Purdue University. Her dissertation, On the Power of Formal Systems for Analyzing Linear and Polynomial Time Program Behavior, was supervised by Paul R. Young.[3]
Joseph, Deborah; Meidânis, João; Tiwari, Prasoon (1992), "Determining DNA sequence similarity using maximum independent set algorithms for interval graphs", Algorithm Theory — SWAT '92: Third Scandinavian Workshop on Algorithm Theory, Helsinki, Finland, July 8–10, 1992, Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 621, Berlin: Springer, pp. 326–337,
doi:
10.1007/3-540-55706-7_29,
MR1249510.