She then went to do her PhD at Yale University, Connecticut, under the supervision of professors Donald Engelman and Frederic M. Richards in the department of molecular biophysics and biochemistry.

After obtaining her doctorate, Wallace was awarded a postdoctoral Jane Coffin Childs fellowship which she undertook at Harvard University under professor Elkan Blout for her first year, before moving to the lab of Dr Richard Henderson at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, learning the technique of electron crystallography for membrane proteins.

[3] After her postdoctoral training Wallace took up an assistant professorship at Columbia University, N.Y. Medical School in the department of biochemistry and molecular biophysics, now part of the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Whilst at Columbia she won the Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award of the Biophysical Society (1984/85) and the following year was promoted to Associate Professor.

[2] In 1990, Wallace was awarded a Fogarty Senior Fellowship[4] enabling her to take a sabbatical to visit and work in the department of crystallography at Birkbeck College, University of London, U.K..

For her "pioneering work" developing biophysical methods and bioinformatics tools to enable research on ion channel/drug interactions, Wallace was awarded the 2020 Khorana Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

[11] Riluzole is the only drug currently licensed in the European Union for the treatment of motor neurone disease (MND), also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

[15] In 1985 Wallace received a Camille Dreyfus teacher-scholar award "to support the research and teaching careers of talented young faculty in the chemical sciences.

The citation reads: "For the pioneering development of biophysical methods and bioinformatics tools to enable the characterisation of ion channel-drug molecule complexes.