She formerly served as a National Science Foundation (NSF) and Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics (KICP) Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago.

[4] In 2017 she earned her PhD in astrophysics with the dissertation Testing Supermassive Black Hole Scaling Relations Using Cosmological Simulations and Optical/Near-IR Imaging Data from University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

She worked at the Steward Observatory looking at the structure and dynamics of astrophysical objects, including dwarf galaxies, galactic rings and supermassive black holes.

[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] She worked with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences to create a series of short scientific films for the general public.

[1] In her own words, Mutlu-Pakdil uses "both large photometric surveys from ground-based and space telescopes in order to discover and characterize the smallest and faintest galaxies in the universe, and the role of dark matter in their formation.