Upon enrolling in doctoral studies at the University of Minnesota Institute of Technology, Zimmerman was named a Corporate Associate Fellow.
[7] Zimmerman completed her dissertation titled Classes of Grzegorczyk-Computable Real Numbers under her doctoral advisor Marian Pour-El.
[9] Zimmerman's research in computer science spans programming languages, compiler design, and robotics, with notable collaboration with Gil de Lamadrid.
[8] Beginning in the early 1990s, Zimmerman and de Lamadrid focused on robotics pathfinding, co-authoring two papers in Robotica in 1993 titled "Avoidance of Obstacles with Unknown Trajectories: Locally Optimal Paths and Path Complexity, Parts I and II."
[8] In 2011, Zimmerman and de Lamadrid introduced FOBS, a hybrid language combining functional and object-oriented paradigms.