[1][2] Despite this non-technical background, she became a member of the technical staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, associated with the California Institute of Technology, in 1983, and continued to hold an affiliation there until 2012.
[2] Returning to graduate study, she earned a master's degree in computer science in 1990 from Iowa State University.
[2] Lutz was named a Distinguished Scientist in the Association for Computing Machinery in 2014.
[3] In 2021, she received the lifetime service award from the IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference.
[4] She was elected as an IEEE Fellow in 2022, "for contributions to software requirements for safety-critical systems".