She studies robustness and feedback in highly connected complex systems, which have applications in a variety of areas including earthquakes, wildfires and neuroscience.
[4][5] She was awarded a David and Lucile Packard Foundation fellowship in 1993, which allowed her to study the physical and mathematical principles that underlie complexity.
HOT represents a unifying framework that can couple with external environments, which differs from self-organized criticality and the edge of chaos.
[10] Carlson worked with Eric Jones to develop a mathematical model that can analyse and predict interactions in the gut bacteria of fruit flies.
[11] She has also applied complexity theory to neuroscience, identifying the properties of neural networks that are protected in the healthy population.
[12] Carlson looks to explain how neural networks are involved with learning and memory, by comparing them to computational and biological information processing structures.
[22] Carlson was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2021, after a nomination from the APS Topical Group on Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, "for the development of mathematically rigorous, physics-based models of nonlinear and complex systems that have significantly impacted a broad range of fields including neuroscience, environmental science, and geophysics".