On July 1, 1989, Ride became a professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and director of the California Space Institute (Cal Space), part of the university's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. She was paid a professor's salary of $64,000 (equivalent to $157,000 in 2023) plus a $6,000 stipend as director of Cal Space, which employed 28 full- and part-time staff and had a budget of $3.3 million (equivalent to $8 million in 2023). Her research primarily involved the study of nonlinear optics and Thomson scattering. She remained director of Cal Space until 1996. She retired from UCSD in 2007 and became a professor emeritus.