There she pioneered live fluorescence imaging of telomeres and repressed chromatin in budding yeast, coupled with biochemical and genetic approaches to understand chromosome structure and nuclear organization.
She was named professor of molecular biology at the University of Geneva in 2001, prior to moving to lead the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, as its director, in 2004.
Since February 2021, she is the director of the ISREC Foundation, which built and maintains the new Agora institute of translational cancer research in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Initially studying chromatin organization in budding yeast, her laboratory combined genetic, biochemical and fluorescence microscopy approaches, developing quantitative live imaging tools to study the subnuclear dynamics of DNA loci in living cells.
Her work elucidated roles of histone modifications and turnover in genome stability and in the spatial organization of chromatin in the interphase nucleus, with an emphasis on the function of subnuclear compartments both in yeast, and in C. elegans during tissue differentiation.
She serves on the ETH board (Rat der Eidgenossosichen Technischen Hochschulen) and the Swiss Science Council.