[1] Her PhD, which she gained in 2000 from the University of Colorado in Boulder, USA, was also in the field of geographic information science.
In 2000, Fabrikant joined the University of California in Santa Barbara, USA as an Assistant Professor in Geographical Information Sciences.
Apart from Geographical Information Visualization, she has mainly contributed to the academic fields of Geovisual Analysis, Spatial Cognition, Graphical Design of Application Interfaces, and Dynamic Cartography.
Fabrikant and her research team have contributed to a deeper understanding of how the use of digital navigation systems influences the human sense of orientation.
[2] Fabrikant served as vice president of the International Cartographic Association in 2015 and received the Michael Breheny Prize together with her former PhD student Marco Salvini for their paper "Spatialization of user-generated content to uncover the multirelational world city network".