Gayme graduated in 1992 from the
Trafalgar Castle School in
Ontario, listing her home address at the time as in
Phoenix, Arizona. She studied mechanical engineering and society as an undergraduate at
McMaster University in Ontario, a program focusing on sustainable applications of engineering; she earned a bachelor's degree there in 1997. She cites Mohamed Elbestawi as a McMaster faculty mentor. After earning a master's degree at the
University of California, Berkeley in 1998, she worked as a research scientist in
Minneapolis for
Honeywell before returning to doctoral study at the
California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where she completed a doctorate in 2010. Her doctoral dissertation,
A robust control approach to understanding nonlinear mechanisms in shear flow turbulence, was jointly supervised by
John Doyle and
Beverley McKeon. After postdoctoral study at Caltech, she took her present faculty position at Johns Hopkins in 2012. She was named as the Carol Linde Croft Faculty Scholar in 2016. ==Recognition==