Her experimental pioneering PhD work changed the understanding of critical phenomena near the Curie point[3] and later in her career she has become known for her theoretical development of the Ericson-Ericson Lorentz-Lorenz correction.

Magda Ericson's thesis on the temperature dependence of slow neutron scattering on iron is an important pioneering experimental study of critical phenomena near the Curie point.

She and her husband, Torleif Ericson, discovered the Ericson-Ericson Lorentz-Lorenz (EELL) effect of the pion-nuclear optical model, which has implications for electromagnetic and weak interactions in nuclei.

[17] Ericson's pioneering results demonstrate the power of slow neutron scattering for investigating condensed matter.

She received a Fulbright scholarship and spent one year at MIT as a postdoctoral researcher in the plasma physics group of Sanborn C. Brown.

A major example is the Ericson-Ericson Lorentz-Lorenz effect for low energy pions, which she examined in detail with Torleif Ericson in a basic paper in 1966, an article that over time has been widely cited.

[4][24] Following the developments of pion low energy theorems, and PCAC in elementary particle physics, she applied in 1969 these techniques to the pion-nucleus threshold interactions, where the finite size of the nucleus presented a conceptual hurdle.

[31] Ericson drew, in the early eighties, attention to the role of pionic physics as one of the origins of the EMC effect.