[2] She received Howard Hughes Medical Institute undergraduate fellowship to spend a summer conducting scientific research in Emory University studying organic chemistry.

[2] She returned to Emory University in 2004, and eventually earned a PhD in Biomolecular Chemistry in 2010 in enzyme structure-function relationship.

[4] Kacar transitioned to study origins of life after Ph.D. She was appointed as a NASA postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology in 2010.

[2] She joined Harvard University in 2014, where she led an independent research group as a fellow in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.

[10] She coined the term paleophenotype, reconstructing and examining the evolutionary history of contemporary components and then tying their phenotypes into biosignatures to provide insight into innovations that are grounded in the rock record and thus in the geological and ecological context.

[11] In 2020, she proposed a possible application of prebiotic chemistry, protospermia, sending the chemical capacity for life to emerge on another planetary body.