Before returning to graduate school in 1983, she worked in Seattle as an engineer at Boeing Commercial Airplanes and Washington Natural Gas.
After obtaining her Ph.D., Rushmeier joined the mechanical engineering faculty as an assistant professor at Georgia Tech, where she taught courses on heat transfer and numerical methods and conducted research on computer graphics image synthesis.
She continued to investigate problems in data visualization as a staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center from 1996 to 2004.
[3] She then assumed her current position as professor of computer science at Yale University, where she served as chair of the department from 2011 to 2014 and again starting in 2023.
The project received a $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for Humanities in order to develop a digital archive of materials related to Dura-Europos.