In 1982 she joined the technical staff of Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, CA and, after a brief stint as a Visiting Professor in the Physics department of the University of California, Berkeley, joined the Chemistry department faculty of Iowa State University in 1983, with a simultaneous appointment as staff scientist with the US Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory She was subsequently promoted to the ranks of Associate Professor (1988), Full Professor (1991) and Distinguished Professor (2001).