In October 1925 she received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to stay at University of California, Berkeley, where she remained for a year.

[2] During her time at Berkeley, she collaborated with R. T. Birge, developing what is now called the Birge-Sponer method for determining dissociation energies.

In 1933 James Franck resigned and left Göttingen and a year later she was dismissed from her position when Hitler came to power, due to the Nazis' stigma against women in academia.

She authored and published numerous studies, many of which were in collaboration with famous physicists including Edward Teller.

She made many contributions to science including the application of quantum mechanics to molecular physics and work on the spectra of near ultra-violet absorption.