[1] Upon completing her formal education, Abshire accepted a faculty appointment at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) in November 2001.
[4] In 2009, Abshire, Smela, and Sarah Bergbreiter won a three-year, $1.5 million NSF grant for Ant-Like Microrobots—Fast, Small, and Under Control.
[5] Two years later, she was the co-recipient of the Jimmy H. C. Lin Award for Entrepreneurship along with Marc Dandin and David Sander, "in recognition of their business plan Ibis Microtech, a new entrepreneurial venture aiming to equip medical professionals, food quality control technicians, first responders, and national defense agencies with cost-effective diagnostics devices capable of performing laboratory-grade analyses on-site, and in record time.
"[7] During the COVID-19 pandemic, Abshire received funding for her project "Tackling Chronic Pain: Machine Learning-Enabled Biomarker Discovery and Sensing" with Reza Ghodssi and Behtash Babadi.
[9] She was later named one of the University of Maryland's 2020-2021 ADVANCE Professors, who "serve as strategic mentors and knowledge brokers for faculty within their college.