In 1973 she was appointed University Lecturer, a post which was associated with Somerville College, Oxford. She became an Additional Fellow of the college and the Janet Vaughan Lecturer. She was now able to expand her team of graduate students and post-doctoral researchers. The phosphorylase work developed and by 1978 the team had discovered its structure and were able to work on its biological control properties. Glycogen phosphorylase is found in muscle and is responsible for mobilising the energy store of glycogen to provide fuel to sustain muscle contraction. In resting muscle the enzyme is switched off to prevent wasteful degradation of the fuel but in response to nervous or hormonal signals the enzyme is switched on almost simultaneously to generate the energy supply. Her research was directed towards understanding the molecular basis of the biological properties of control and catalytic mechanism. Her team used the bright x-ray source generated at the Synchrotron Radiation Source at Daresbury, which provided data that could not be obtained with the home source. She was David Phillips Professor in Molecular Biophysics, University of Oxford, in 1990–2007.