[1] She next won a NASA Hubble Fellowship, which she held at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson and subsequently at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Malhotra and collaborators used Infrared Space Observatory data to study the far-infrared line emission from galaxies.
In particular, she demonstrated that the 158 micron emission line of ionized carbon becomes a relatively less prominent spectral feature in galaxies with higher infrared luminosity and/or warmer interstellar dust.
This was one of the first research projects to successfully identify galaxies in the early universe using their Lyman alpha emission lines, a method that had been first proposed in 1967 by Bruce Partridge and Jim Peebles.
In particular, she demonstrated that they tend to be young, with extreme star formation properties[7] and (for galaxies) small sizes.
[citation needed] Malhotra has advised over a half dozen Ph.D. thesis students, including Steven Finkelstein, Nimish Hathi, Vithal Tilvi, Lifang Xia, Huan Yang, Tianxing Jiang, and John Pharo.