[6] Following her Ph.D. work, the National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics awarded Willenbring a Synthesis Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Minnesota.
Two years later, in 2008, Willenbring was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship at Leibniz University Hannover and GFZ-Potsdam in Germany where she worked until 2010.
[9] Willenbring's work focuses on how the Earth's surface changes in response to a variety of forces including tectonics, climate, and living organisms.
[1][10] Willenbring is at the forefront of her field[11] and has developed the use of beryllium-9 and cosmogenic beryllium-10 to trace erosion,[12] weathering,[13] and meltwater pulses[14] in order to study and track the changes in Earth's surface.
[1][10] Their research has uncovered that nutrient-rich dust travels to Puerto Rico from the Sahara Desert which helps trees to grow in Puerto-Rico's nutrient-poor soil.
[1] In 2016, Willenbring received a National Science Foundation CAREER grant which she will use to study how beryllium isotopes can be used to track land-based sediment.
[3] In addition to Antarctica and Puerto Rico, Willenbring has also conducted research in Canada, and the South Fork Eel River in Northern California.
[21] The case led to an investigation by the science committee of the US House of Representatives, as well as the renaming of an Antarctic glacier previously named after Marchant and his firing from Boston University.