The collection she donated to Bryn Mawr includes jade, ivory, and bronze objects, landscape watercolors, and etchings by Pablo Picasso, Jacques Villon, Auguste Rodin, and Leonard Baskin.
She met John Spangler Nicholas as an undergraduate attending summer classes at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory.
[7] Oppenheimer's experimental career grew from her graduate work with Fundulus heteroclitus, and she made significant contributions to teleost embryology.
Seven early papers were based upon grafting experiments and demonstrated that the dorsal lips of fish and amphibian embryos showed the same organizer activity.
Oppenheimer also performed fate mapping experiments, described cell movements of gastrulation, and published a staging series for Fundulus embryos.
[9] Oppenheimer's work in the field included Essays in the History of Embryology and Biology (1967), which focused largely on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but ventured as far back as the sixteenth.