She is also a program director in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences at the US National Science Foundation, where her responsibilities include programs on Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace, The Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier, Smart and Connected Communities, and Securing American Infrastructure.
In her early studies with Lee Sproull and her colleagues and students, she examined how computer networking changed group dynamics and social interaction.
Through field observations and experiments they demonstrated the influence of computer-mediated communication phenomena such as status equalization, personal connections and flaming.
Research with Robert E. Kraut from the 1990s showed that everyday use of the Internet increased users' depression and decreased their social connections.
[4][5] Her ongoing projects include studies of collaboration and virtual organization in science,[6] of collaborative analysis online,[7] of the cognitive and social aspects of human-robot and digital agent interaction,[8] and of how people perceive and try to protect their privacy online.