Before joining Duke Kunshan, she was the John T. Herwick, M.D. Professor of Chemistry and associate provost at Washington and Lee University, where she also served as associate dean of the college from 2012 to 2017. She has also served as a visiting research scientist at Dupont, Stanford University, the University of St. Andrews and the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (AgroParisTech).
France has a B.Sc. in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she did undergraduate research under 2001 Nobel laureate K. Barry Sharpless, and an M.Sc. in chemistry from Yale University. She was a National Science Foundation pre-doctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology, where she earned a Ph.D. in organic chemistry for work on the development of ruthenium catalysts for olefin metathesis with 2005 Nobel laureate Robert H. Grubbs.