Her dissertation, Finite Type Invariants for Knots in 3-Manifolds, was supervised by Joan Birman and Xiao-Song Lin.
She was promoted to full professor in 2008 and received the MSU William J. Beal Outstanding Faculty Award in 2019.
[2][3] Kalfagianni has made contributions in knot theory, three-manifolds, hyperbolic geometry, quantum topology and the interplay of these fields.
With David Futer and Jessica Purcell, Kalfagianni is co-author of the research monograph Guts of Surfaces and the Colored Jones Polynomial (Lecture Notes in Mathematics 2069, Springer, 2013) that derives relations between colored Jones polynomials, the topology of incompressible spanning surfaces in knot and link complements and hyperbolic geometry.
[9] She was also one of the editors of the book Interactions Between Hyperbolic Geometry, Quantum Topology and Number Theory (Contemporary Mathematics Volume: 541, AMS, 2011) .