Steffaney received her B.S. in Environmental Studies with a minor in Chemistry from Davidson College in 2018, where she studied Pseudo-nitzschia blooms along the US west coast. After, she received a Fulbright-EDUFI grant to research cyanobacterial akinetes and toxin records in sediment archives from the Baltic Sea with Drs. Sanna Suikkanen and Anke Kremp at the Finnish Environment Institute Marine Research Centre in Helsinki, Finland. She earned an M.S. in Microbiology & Microbial Biotechnology from the University of Helsinki after her Fulbright grant period. Steffaney joined the Moore Lab in Fall 2020 and is interested in toxin biosynthesis in harmful algae species.