Oppenheimer holds an adjunct professorship at Columbia University 's Department of Astronomy and has published over two hundred and sixty research and public-oriented science articles, with an h-index over 55 and more than 10,000 citations. She holds three patents, is the co-discoverer of the first brown dwarf, Gliese 229 B, and is active in research on exoplanets. She has led or co-led many novel instrumentation projects, including the Lyot Project, Project 1640, the Gemini Planet Imager, Palomar Adaptive Optics, and the Palomar Advanced Radial Velocity Instrument.