During her career, she was an investigator at the National Institutes of Health and a research professor of experimental medicine at Rutgers Medical School.

She worked as an associate in the division of nutrition and physiology at the Public Health Research Institute.

In 1954, she came to the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases and continued her biochemical work conducting classical studies on the structure of glycogen.

[3] From 1963 to 1971, Stetten worked at the Rutgers Medical School as a research professor of experimental medicine.

[3] Stetten was a member of the executive committee and board of trustees of the Marine Biological Laboratory.