Baldridge is originally from Minot, North Dakota, and graduated from Minot State University in 1982. She earned her Ph.D. from North Dakota State University and was a postdoctoral researcher at Wesleyan University. After becoming a scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, she became a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego in 1995, and continued to work at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and hold an adjunct professorship at the university before becoming a professor of theoretical chemistry at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. She moved to Tianjin University in 2014, following her husband Jay S. Siegel, who became dean of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology at Tianjin in 2013.