[1] She is also the Principal Investigator for the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Virtual Planetary Laboratory[2] Lead Team and the chair of the NAI Focus Group on Habitability and Astronomical Biosignatures (HAB).
Scientific American consulted her for comments when the Kepler space telescope mission discovered large numbers of planets orbiting distant stars.
With her Virtual Planetary Laboratory, she develops computer models to understand the process by which planets form, their stability and orbital evolution.
In 2015, she co-published a new metric called the “habitability index for transiting planets” which aims to help prioritize where to conduct closer inspections among the thousands of exoplanets being discovered, with the best prospects for identifying signs of life beyond Earth.
[4] One of the key factors is to test for the presence of oxygen on candidate planets, so her team of 75 researchers in 2016 were investigating how to distinguish false positive signals from true signs of biological activity.