Schulten attended the University of Southern California, receiving a B.S. in chemistry in 1969.  She then went to Harvard University, from which she was received an M.S. in chemistry  in 1972, and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 1975. Her advisors were Donald G. M. Anderson and Roy Gerald Gordon. She worked as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany, from 1975 to 1980, and at the department of theoretical physics at the Technical University of Munich from 1980 to 1985.