After graduation, she worked for the Finnish Institute of Marine Research for 40 years, beginning in 1933, and serving as the head of the Sea Level Department from 1955 until her retirement in 1972. Lisitzin's research on sea level variation included over a hundred professional publications. In her own institutional history, she modestly described her research until the late 1950s as focused only on the Baltic Sea, and "reasonably narrow, though regionally thorough". Be that as it may, her monograph on forecasting water temperatures in the Archipelago Sea had sold in bookstores since 1939, and her study on the factors affecting the sea level of the Gulf of Bothnia had been jointly presented to the Finnish Society of Scientists by director Erik Palmén and professor Einar Stenij in 1945. The last 15 years of her career developed a wider scope, including an important review of global tide data collected during the International Geophysical Year with fellow female oceanographer June Pattullo (Oregon State University), concluding that seasonal variation in Pacific sea level is influenced by air pressure above ~40 degrees latitude, but primarily isostatic below. She later generalized and expanded these findings into a short monograph that included the rest of the world's oceans. This work was carried out after she represented the institute at the first International Oceanographic Congress (1959) in New York City, and during a six-month stay at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California.