[2] At UC Berkeley, Whaley is the director of the Berkeley Quantum Information and Computation Center, a member of the executive board for the Center for Quantum Coherent Science, and a member of the Kavli Energy Nanosciences Institute.
Her interest in quantum biology was spurred by a series of low-temperature experiments in bacteria performed by Graham Fleming and his team in 2007.
In 2002 she was nominated as a Fellow of American Physical Society by the Division of Computational Physics "for her contributions to theoretical understanding of quantum nanoscale phenomena, especially in superfluid helium droplets, and to control of decoherence in quantum information processing".
[10] Whaley served on the advisory board of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 2014 to 2017 and was chairperson from 2016 to 2017.
In 2016, Whaley also served as chair of the 2015 Fellowship Committee of the American Physical Society Division of Quantum Information.