 Her career as a biochemist has been heavily focused on studying the structure and dynamics of chromatin and its role in the repression and activation of genes via regulatory proteins.She was the first person to isolate and characterize the histone octamer, which ultimately and led to the universal nucleosome model for chromatin structure formulated by Roger D. Kornberg.Kornberg would eventually be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on gene transcription and translation.