 She is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and her research focuses on bacterial quorum sensing, which is the cell-to-cell communication in bacteria.She has received numerous awards for her research, including the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences (2009), the Richard Lounsbery Award (2011), and the L’Oreal-UNESCO award (2012), a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), and the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize (2016).She is a former president of the American Society for Microbiology, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a former six-year member of National Science Board.