[2][3] Edwards was best known for leadership in the design, construction, commissioning, and operation of the Tevatron, which for 25 years was the most powerful particle collider in the world.

Tevatron recorded its first proton-antiproton collisions in 1985 and was used to find the top quark in 1995 and the tau neutrino in 2000, two of the three fundamental particles discovered at Fermilab.

After 1992, Edwards made significant contributions to the development of high-gradient, superconducting linear accelerators as well as bright and intense electron sources.

[4] She led a Fermilab group collaborating with DESY in the 1990s and built the photoinjector for the TESLA Test Facility at the German laboratory.

In her most well-known work, she oversaw the building of the Tevatron, one of the highest energy super-conducting particle accelerators ever constructed.