In addition to her research, she spent much time attempting to improve outreach for women in science and address sex discrimination in regards to promotions and advancement.

The work she conducted with graduate students formed into its own independent research program, despite technically still being under the purview of the Sussex lab.

She noticed this lack of advancement for other women and how little the all-male graduate class at the university cared about the issue, so she made two decisions.

[1] First, she formed a class with Virginia Walbot on how science and society interact, having the students collect local river water nearby to factories and other industries, in order to see how such sites had negative impacts on the people living in New Haven, Connecticut.

This led her to help found organizations including the Human Frontier Science Program and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.

[5] During research for the Human Genome Project, the scientists involved chose not to include Arabidopsis thaliana as one of their model organisms for testing.

[1] She published a paper[7] in the August 1960 issue of Science that covered the differentiation of vascular tissue in tobacco through the use of hormone induction that would be a highly discussed publication showcasing how cells can be forcibly altered.

[1] The following year, she released an announcement on a successful experiment using plant hormones to convert the food storage cells into ones that conducted water instead.

[8] After joining Sussex's lab, she began working on how auxins affect cell differentiation and how said hormones are moved throughout the plant tissues.

Working to gather members for the subsequent meeting of the group, she successfully had close to a thousand women join the organization.