She is noted for her work on the impact of computer science on people and society, analyses of social media, and algorithm auditing.

[2] Karahalios joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2004 as an assistant professor and received tenure in 2010.

Her 2014 paper on auditing algorithms provided research methods for detecting discrimination on internet platforms[3] has been cited more than 200 times.

In 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit on behalf of Karahalios and several other plaintiffs[6] against Loretta Lynch, in her official capacity as Attorney General of the United States, challenging "the constitutionality of a provision of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”), 18 U.S.C.

[9] She has received Best Paper awards for publications in the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in 2008, 2009, 2015, and 2017[10]