Vilas earned her BA in astronomy in 1973 at Wellesley College and her MS in Earth and Planetary Sciences in 1975 at MIT.

Her observations helped to prove the existence of Neptune's rings five years before they were confirmed by a 1989 Voyager mission.

[1] She designed the coronagraph used to produce the first-ever image of a circumstellar disk around another star (Beta Pictoris) in 1984.

[2] Since her MS degree, Vilas has worked on the planet Mercury,[3] serving an editor for a 1989 collection of reviews published by the University of Arizona Press.

Her grandfather was the first person to fly across Lake Michigan, and in celebration of that feat's 100th anniversary she recreated his flight.