Hurwitz has two master's degrees: an M.A. in psychology from Arizona State University, earned in 1977,
and an M.S. in statistics from Stanford University, earned in 1981.
She completed her Ph.D. in psychology in 1992 at Temple University.[2] Her dissertation was Judgments of Correlation: Level of Measurement and Co-occurrence Bias.[4]
She worked as a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania from 1981 to 1992, when she moved to the Harvard School of Public Health.
In 1997, she moved again, to Brigham and Women's Hospital, and at the same time took a teaching position in the Harvard Medical School. She became a regular-rank faculty member at Harvard in 2005.[2]