Olson remained at the Flory group for a post doc research, after which she became a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow with geneticist Charles R. Cantor at Columbia University.
In 1972, Olson became an assistant professor at Rutgers University and full professor in 1979.
During her time at Rutgers, she was a visiting professor at the University of Basel in Switzerland (1979–1980) and at the Polymer Chemistry Department of the Jilin University in Changchun, China (1981).
Wilma Olson was involved in setting up the nucleic acid database, in collaboration with Helen M. Berman.