One of the founders of the Society for General Microbiology, and Alexander Fleming tried to induce her to take the role of the Society's first President, but she declined; Stephenson was elected as its second president in 1947. After the war the Rockefeller Foundation and the Medical Research Council funded a new laboratory at Cambridge (known as the "Bug Hut"), to which she moved in 1947. Stephenson was also influential in improving teaching of microbial biochemistry; she helped set up a special Part II Biochemistry (Microbial) in Cambridge in the same year.