[3] Her dissertation was The Design and Evaluation of Computer-Based Chemistry Lessons,[1] and was supervised by Stanley G.
[4] From 1975 to 1977 she worked with the PLATO computer-aided instruction system at the Computer-Based Education Research Laboratory of the University of Illinois, and from 1977 to 1980 she was a researcher at the Laboratory of Theoretical Biology in the National Cancer Institute.
After working as a software developer for four years, she returned to academic research in the psychology department of Stanford University from 1984 to 1987, and in the Center for Design of Educational Computing and the Center for Innovation in Learning at Carnegie Mellon University from 1987 to 2002.
[2][3] With Bruce A. Sherwood, also of North Carolina State University, Chabay is the author of the two-volume textbook Matter & Interactions (Wiley, 2002).
[5] Chabay was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2009 "for contributions to the development of computer-based learning and tutorial systems, visualizations, and curricula that have modernized and improved how students learn physics".