She was awarded a graduate fellowship at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and completed her postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Francisco.
[2] Murphy's lab at Princeton focuses on identifying transcriptional targets related to longevity, using the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model.
Early in her career, Murphy and her postdoctoral mentor Cynthia Kenyon determined that by deactivating one C. elegans gene, called "daf-2", the worms' life expectancy doubled and they expressed a delayed senescence, showing marked behavioral improvements in long-term memory, working memory, and navigational capabilities as compared to the control.
Since many of the genetic pathways in C. elegans are comparable to those in other organisms, including a 40% overlap with the human genome, Murphy's work is providing a better understanding of how genes related to longevity in humans express themselves, and how the breakdown of communication pathways between tissues during aging occurs.
[5] In 2016, Murphy was selected as a faculty scholar by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.