She served on the math and computer science faculty at several other universities, including
Tufts University, the
University of Southern California,
Florida International University, and the
Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), prior to joining the MIT faculty in 1982. Since then, she has been working on applying mathematics to the tasks of understanding and constructing complex distributed systems. She has overseen the work of over 25 doctoral students, 50 master’s students, and several postdoctoral researchers. Her 1985 work with
Michael J. Fischer and
Mike Paterson on
consensus problems received the
PODC Influential-Paper Award in 2001. Their work showed that in an asynchronous distributed system, consensus is impossible if there is one processor that crashes. On their contribution,
Jennifer Welch wrote that "this result has had a monumental impact in distributed computing, both theory and practice. Systems designers were motivated to clarify their claims concerning under what circumstances the systems work." She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the
National Academy of Engineering, and an ACM Fellow. ==Recognition==