Ashley obtained her BS degree in Chemical Engineering from WPI, and then pursued her MS as part of WPI's 5-year BS/MS program. She extended her senior year MQP project to an MS Thesis. Ashley did her MQP as part of a group of four students who carried out an experimental study of heating and cooling in a packed bed. Ashley then extended the experimental work and developed a CFD model of heat transfer in packed beds to compare to the experimental results. Her 2014 MS thesis is entitled "Comparison of CFD simulation and experimental data for heating and cooling in low N packed beds of spherical particles".

Ashley is currently a Process Engineer at St. Gobain in Roxboro, N.C.