[8] She completed a Ph.D. in Bacteriology in 1940 with a dissertation titled "The influence of solid surfaces upon lake bacteria",[9] research that was later published in the scientific literature.
My advisor was a woman and there were three other female graduate students in bacteriology[8]Following her Ph.D., Edmondson was a teaching fellow in science at Bennington College and she remained there during World War Two.
[16][17][12][8] In 1945 a Science news article described her leave of absence from Bennington to work at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on salt water ponds.
[18] There she first worked with her husband quantifying how the addition of nutrients altered the growth of phytoplankton with the goal of estimating options for aquaculture;[19] she focused on how oysters responded to higher levels of food that resulted from fertilization of the water.
[12] In 1937, Edmondson (then Yvette Hardman) was a visiting investigator at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where she worked with Selman Waksman and others on marine microbiology.