She also spent summers at the nearby Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution studying the effect of water pollution on coastal ponds.

During her undergraduate years, she also participated in a number of summer programs, including the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Soderberg was awarded her doctorate in astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology under the guidance of advisor Shrinivas Kulkarni, where her thesis used data gathered from the Palomar Observatory and the Very Large Array to provide a better understanding of gamma ray bursts and stripped core-collapse supernovae.

[3] On February 18, 2006, Soderberg was a member of a group of researchers who detected the gamma-ray burst GRB 060218 located 440 million light years (135 Mpc) away in the constellation Aries.

[4] Soderberg and her colleagues detected the supernova SN 2008D as it was occurring on January 9, 2008, using data from NASA's Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission X-ray space telescope, from a precursor star in the spiral galaxy NGC 2770, 88 million light years away (27 Mpc).