She is a professor at the University of Gothenburg, and was named a fellow of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography in 2017.
Following her Ph.D. she did postdoctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology and the University of Copenhagen.
Starting in 2006 she was a scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research,[3] and in 2008 she moved to Stockholm University where she had a Marie Curie fellowship.
[3] Ploug's early research used fiber optic sensors to measure light in marine sediments.
[12] Her recent research has focused on measurements of biogeochemical cycling at the single cell level using Nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometry.