[2] At the age of 16, she was a senior in Boca Raton Community High School and was a semi-finalist in the 1984 National Merit Scholarship competition.
[5] In this role, she was a member of a research team that developed a new mouse model of Obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) by deleting a gene that codes for Sapap3.
[10] In 2015, Calakos became an Harrington Scholar-Innovator to support her project "Novel Targeting of the ER Stress Response Pathway to Treat Movement Disorders of the Nervous System.
"[2] Following her promotion to associate professor, Calakos built on her early OCD study and found that overactivity of a single type of receptor for neurotransmitters was the major driver for the abnormal behaviors.
[14] She was also elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for "pioneering work in optogenetic approaches, and substantial contributions in the area of synaptic plasticity with a focus on striatal circuity of the basal ganglia.