Her primary area of interest is in the estimation of evolutionary trees, and she works to develop tools that can assess how well a given model describes a sequence of data.

[1] Holland spent about a year beginning in 2001 as a Post Doctoral Researcher at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany.

[5] Holland's expertise has allowed her serve as associate, principal, and co-investigator on a variety of research projects and has earned her a number of professional awards and recognitions.

[6] The next year she was the Principal Investigator on another Marsden-funded project, 'Genome-scale plant phylogeny and the challenge of lineage-specific sequence evolution'.

[7] Also in 2005, she received the Bridge to Employment Grant from the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (FoRST)[8] and the Hamilton Award[9] from the Royal Society of New Zealand, and was invited to attend the SMBE Tri-national Young Investigators Workshop.

In 2008, was an Associate Investigator at the Allan Wilson Centre[citation needed] and received the Early Career Research Award[13] from the New Zealand Mathematical Society.

One was titled 'Ancient Ibis Mummies from Egypt: DNA Evolution' and funded by a Human Frontier Science Program grant.