Ferrier received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics (1984) and a master’s degree in computer science at the University of Alberta (1987). Her doctoral studies, on “control of robot binocular vision systems,” were completed at Harvard University in 1992. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Oxford University (1992–1994) and a postdoc at Harvard (1995), she joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1996. She became an associate professor in 2003 and a professor in 2009.
She received the NSF CAREER Award (1997), the University of Wisconsin Vilas Associates Assistant Professorship (1999), and the University of Wisconsin Honored Instructor Award (2009). She has published more than 80 papers in journals and refereed conferences during her tenure at the University of Wisconsin. Ferrier was PI or coPI on grants totaling just over $10 million during her career there. She served on the Physical Sciences Divisional Committee for the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2009 to 2012 (as vice-chair from 2010 to 2011; as chair from 2011 to 2012). In 2013 Ferrier joined Argonne National Laboratory as a research scientist and is a Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute, University of Chicago.