She has been a faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada since 2012.
Dittrich received her PhD in 2005 from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam, Germany, under the supervision of Thomas Thiemann.
She then worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Perimeter Institute until 2008, as a Marie Curie Fellow at Utrecht University until 2009 and as the Max Planck Research Group Leader at Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics until 2012.
She is currently focusing on investigating the large scale behavior of spin foam models.
In 2007 she was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal for young scientists from the Max Planck Society.