Byrne is the co-editor of
Australian Echinoderms. She and co-author Tim O'Hara were joint winners of the 2018
Whitley Medal for the book. She has been publishing her research on
Echinodermata since the early 1980s. In 2000-2002 she was the President of the Australian Marine Sciences Association. Her research interests include the impact of climate change on
marine invertebrates, She has published on sea-urchins and crown-of-thorns star-fish., as well as
evolutionary developmental biology, She has also published on egg-provisioning, and the use of mass-spectrometry as well as the biology of the crown of thorns star-fish Her most cited article (October 2020) with 966 citations is "Global warming and recurrent mass bleaching of corals". Byrne was elected Fellow of the
Australian Academy of Science in 2019. == Selected publications ==