In 1977 Vaida became a
Xerox postdoctoral fellow at
Harvard University, working alongside
Dudley R. Herschbach and Bill Reinhart on photoreaction dynamics. She collaborated with Kevin Peters and
Meredith Applebury at
Bell Labs. She was made a member of the faculty at
Harvard University in 1978. She moved to the
University of Colorado Boulder, where she built her own spectroscopy lab. She identified the excited state of OCIO with
Susan Solomon in 1989. After collaborating with
Susan Solomon, Vaida recognised that her studies of model compounds could be useful in atmospheric chemistry. Her group went on to study atmospheric ozone, water clusters and polar ice. She divorced Kevin Peters in 1990. She hypothesised that aerosol coagulation and division permitted organics to form a surfactant layer on top of the aerosol and recognised that this was similar to single cell bacteria. In 2007 she was appointed distinguished lecturer at
Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer
University of Colorado Boulder. In 2018 the
Journal of Physical Chemistry A published a tribute to Vaida and her research. • 2004 – Fellow of the
American Physical Society • 2004 – Fellow of the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study • 2004 – Fellow of the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation • 2011 –
American Chemical Society E. Bright Wilson Award • 2020 –
American Chemical Society Irving Langmuir Award in Chemical Physics • 2020 – Member of the
National Academy of Sciences ==Personal life==