As an undergraduate at the
University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Bock earned a bachelor's degree in the
German language in 1967. She switched to mathematics for her graduate studies at the same university, completing her PhD in 1974 under the supervision of Robert B. Ash with a dissertation on
Certain Minimax Estimators of the Mean of a Multivariate Normal Distribution. As chair of statistics at Purdue from 1995 to 2010, Bock led the department through a period of growth, and took a multidisciplinary approach to the subject that included
computational statistics as well as application areas including
biostatistics,
statistical finance, and
environmental statistics. ==Awards and honors==