In 1972, Faber joined the faculty of the
Lick Observatory at
University of California, Santa Cruz, becoming the first woman on staff. This was the first proposal of how galaxies have formed and evolved from the
Big Bang to today. While some details have been proven wrong, the paper still stands as the current working paradigm for structure information in the universe. She and her collaborators discovered high-speed galaxy flows. During the later 1980s, Faber got involved in an eight-year project called the "
Seven Samurai" collaboration, which attempted to catalogue the size and orbital speeds of 400 galaxies. Though this goal was not met, the group developed a way to estimate the distance to any galaxy, which became one of the most reliable ways to measure the total density of the universe. In 1990, she assisted with the on-orbit commissioning of the wide field planetary camera for the Hubble Space Telescope. She says this was one of the most exhilarating and well-known phases of her career. The optics of the Hubble were flawed, and Faber and her team helped to diagnose the cause as
spherical aberration. In 1995, Faber was appointed University Professor at UCSC. At UCSC she focuses her research on the evolution of structure in the universe and the evolution and formation of galaxies. In addition to this, she led the development of the DEIMOS instrument on the
Keck telescopes to obtain spectra of cosmologically distant galaxies. On August 1, 2012 she became the Interim Director of the
University of California Observatories. Sandra Faber was a co-editor of the
Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics with
Ewine van Dishoeck from 2012 to 2021. She co-chairs the Board of Directors of
Annual Reviews. ==Honors and awards==