After Simon Fraser University refused to reimburse her $17 for childcare expenses while she was delivering a guest speech in Victoria, where she’d traveled with her nursing baby, she went first to her department and then Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) with her protest, which ended with the NSERC changing their policy to make childcare a covered expense for nursing researchers they funded.

[3] She proposed and actively promoted the provision of childcare at logic programming conferences, until it was adopted formally into their constitution, and is now routinely offered as a result.

[3] She also obtained a change in SFU's legislation when it resulted in her graduate student being timed out for delays caused by life-threatening medical conditions upon birthing twins.

She was awarded the prestigious Marie Curie Chair of Excellence 2008-2011 from the European Commission for her pioneering work on Constraint Solving and Language Processing for Bioinformatics.

Dahl's research has had theoretical and practical impact in logic, linguistics, computational intelligence, internet programming, virtual worlds and molecular biology.

[2] Her work on discovering signature oligos, which resulted in software being used daily at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, has also been used to complete the validation of an array for all Phytophthora species, with high impact for forestry (as one of the species is the causal agent of the sudden oak death which is devastating California), for marine sciences (it has been used to monitor biodiversity in Hawaïian coral reefs), for entomology (for characterizing biting flies) and for detecting fraudulent fish sales.