She is a Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine and Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of California, San Diego and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
She chose the motor protein myosin as the topic of her Ph.D. work in the laboratories of Mark Mooseker and Peter Novick at Yale University.
[5] She developed a modified in vitro motility assay to show that both Myo2p and Myo4p class V myosins in yeast appear to be non-processive motors in the absence of additional regulation, unlike their vertebrate counterparts.
She began to work on dynein, a molecular motor that transports cargoes such as proteins, organelles and messenger RNAs to locations where they are needed in the cell.
Defects in dyneins and their regulatory proteins lead to neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases, showing the importance of microtubule-based transport in long cells such as neurons.