Research summary: Her research interests encompass both, integrated stratigraphy and geochronology, and the paleobiology of calcareous nannoplankton.

Her stratigraphic background concerns Cenozoic successions on land (northwestern Europe, Egypt, Central and South America, Gulf of Mexico, New Jersey Coastal Plain) and deep-sea settings, for the purpose of dating, correlation, and temporal interpretations. I presided UNESCO IGCP Project 308 “Paleocene/Eocene Boundary Events in Space and Time” and chaired the P/E boundary working Group. Her research in Egypt extended into Geoarchaeology and her general background prompted her interest in geochronology (time scales) and chronostratigraphy.  She has been a Voting member of the ICS  International Subcommissions of Paleogene Stratigraphy (ISPS), Neogene stratigraphy (SNS) and Stratigraphic Classification (ISSC).  She is currently a corresponding member of the last two subcommissions.  She is also a Member of the North American Commission on Stratigraphic nomenclature.

She became interested in the paleobiology of coccolithophores through her biostratigraphic research on the Paleogene of northwestern Europe. The thrust of my work resides in the description of coccoliths and associated skeletons as morpho-structures. This provides a reliable background for high rank taxonomy (genus and above) in living and fossil coccolithophores (s.l.), and allows the description of phylogenetic relationships among taxa, the delineation of notable morphological trends through time, and the documentation of the response of coccolithophores to major events in Mesozoic and Cenozoic history. More recently she has become interested in the origin of calcification in the nannoplankton and how biomineralization determines the evolutionary history (diversification, longevity) of taxa. She has written a multi-volume Handbook on Cenozoic Calcareous Nannoplankton (now out-of-print) and she is currently publishing a multivolume monograph concerned with the taxonomic orders that originated in the Mesozoic and spanned the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary.