I believe it is and she probably knows this regardless. Still, it is relatively uncommon for a federal judge to take an "independent" stance on scientific or technical issues before them.
In most senses, this is a product of the adversarial system in which the facts are those produced by the parties in evidence before the court. Like juries are discouraged/forbidden from independently researching a case, so too do federal judges tend to avoid extrajudicial knowledge.
The rules don't forbid it for judges and federal judges in particular have more freedom to do it and to comment on it in court, even before a jury.
There's a judge in San Francisco/San Jose with a degree in math that is an amateur computer scientist who presided over Google v. Oracle and was openly independent and skeptical of some of the assertions of the parties there based on his own knowledge.
More typical, though, is Chief Judge David Godbey of the ND Tex in Dallas, who has a BSEE but feigns not knowing what a transistor does.