Pickett taught at Illinois and
Goucher College before returning to Mount Holyoke in 1930. She would stay there until she retired in 1968. During her 1932–1933 leave she worked with the famous X-ray crystallographer and Nobel laureate
Sir William Bragg at the
Royal Institution, London. In 1939, on an Educational Foundation Fellowship she worked with
Victor Henri at
University of Liège, Belgium, and with
George Kistiakowsky at Harvard. As much as Lucy would have liked to have continued her work in X-ray crystallography, she returned to Mount Holyoke College to join in an active team of researchers, including Emma Perry Carr and Mary Sherrill, who were investigating molecular structures through spectroscopy. In 1939, Pickett went to Belgium to the University of Liege, where she began her work with spectroscopist, Victor Henri, and in the same year, to Harvard to work with molecular spectroscopist, George Kistiakowsky. In 1942, Pickett and Carr traveled to Chicago to attend a conference on spectroscopy organized by Robert S. Mulliken. Lucy worked with Milliken in 1952 on theoretical interpretations of the spectrum of the benzenium ion. Her colleagues and students created The Lucy Pickett Lectureship, a lectureship designed to bring outstanding speakers to the Mount Holyoke campus. The first speaker was
Robert Mulliken, 1966
Chemistry Nobel laureate, with whom Pickett had published a paper in 1954. In the 1970s, Pickett requested that the funds be used to honor
women scientists. ==Publications==