[5] After graduation from the University of Pennsylvania, Lippincott attended Swarthmore College, where she worked closely with Peter van de Kamp on many astrometry projects between 1945 and his retirement in 1972, when she became observatory director.
Garroway had an active interest in astronomy, and they met on a tour of observatories in the Soviet Union that she was hosting.
[8] She conducted numerous astrometric studies of nearby stars with van de Kamp in the search for extrasolar planets.
She reported the discovery of several objects of substellar mass and proposed a 0.01 solar-mass planetary companion to the star Lalande 21185 in 1951.
[10] These calculations were used by Walter Baade to find and optically resolve this binary system for the first time using the then new 5 m (200 in) Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California.