[3][4] Voytek came to NASA from the U.S. Geological Survey in Reston, VA, where she headed the USGS Microbiology and Molecular Ecology Laboratory from 1998 to 2009.

She has worked in several extreme environments, including Antarctica, hypersaline lakes, deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and terrestrial deep-subsurface sites.

After her postdoc at Rutgers University she was a visiting research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Limnology in Plön, Germany from 1997 to 1998.

[6] Voytek joined the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Research Program in 1998 where she led the Microbiology and Molecular Ecology team until 2009.

In December 2010, she defended a news release of NASA on the possibility there might be a principally wider basis of life than so far assumed, following conclusions of a study by Felisa Wolfe-Simon on the arsenic-eating bacterium GFAJ-1, as presenting a "phenomenal finding".