Later hired by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), she was placed into increasing positions of influence by program director Mary Clutter and put in charge of the various plant genome projects in progress.
[1] She attended International Christian University in Tokyo and received a Bachelor's degree in biology,[2] during which she conducted undergraduate research in the lab of her adviser, Masayuki Katsumi.
Visited by UCLA professor Bernard Phinney, he suggested that Dilworth become a graduate student in his lab, which she accepted after Katsumi's approval and began attending in 1967[3] through the use of a Fulbright Fellowship.
She was later made the postdoctoral representative for the faculty search committee and was involved in the hiring of two assistant professors for the research laboratory.
[3] She was involved in creating coordinating committees to focus on the multiple scientific fields needed to map the genomes of plants.
She returned to a working position, however, in 2015 after the creation of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University to become the vice president for gender equality.
This position allowed her to continue her previous efforts of increasing the number of Japanese women joining STEM fields.
Once she had changed to a UGA lab, her research swapped to cottonseed and how the germinating seeds' storage proteins control their amino acid metabolism.