Van de Flierdt is interested in the marine-terminating sector of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet during past warm periods. Her research looks to develop new geochemical and isotopic tracers in marine geochemistry, paleoceanography and paleoclimate, with particular focus on radiogenic isotopes. She is co-lead of the MAGIC Isotope group in the Department of Earth Sciences at Imperial College London. She is also a research at the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.
She is part of the international Geotraces program. Part of the Geotraces program is to ensure results for trace elements and isotopes collected on different cruises by different laboratories can be compared in a meaningful way. Van de Flierdt is building a global database of neodymium in the oceans and researching the implications for paleoceanography research.
In 2012 she won a Leverhulme Trust grant to research deep sea corals. She was part of the Natural Environment Research Council project SWEET, Super-Warm Early Eocene Temperatures and climate. She has led several major NERC grants, totalling well over a £1,000,000 as principal investigator. Van de Flierdt is a member of the Royal Societys International Exchange Committee. She is an editor of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. She has appeared on the podcast Forecast: Climate Conversations'.