[4] She met her husband, Arshad Desai, at UCSF while completing her doctorate and they have two children, an eight-year-old girl and a twelve-year-old boy.
[4][6] Oegema took a joint appointment in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, setting up her own lab in 2003 at the University of California, San Diego Medical School.
[1][2][3][4] Her lab studies centriole duplication and the molecular mechanics underlying cytokinesis utilizing C. elegans as a model system.
[8] During her postdoc in the Hyman Lab at MPI, Oegema helped to pioneer a C. elegans RNAi (RNA mediated interference) screening system that identified 133 genes necessary for cellular processes in early embryos and also indicated that this screen could be applied to the gene functions of other species as well.
[4][9] Oegema has helped to identify and characterize multiple proteins involved in the regulation of kinetochores and their role in chromosome segregation, known now as CENP-AHCP-3, CENP-CHCP-4 and KNL-3.