She completed her PhD at UCD in 2006 and was subsequently employed as a researcher on a number of funded projects, including a national study of attrition in rape cases (NUI Galway) and a longitudinal study of pathways to desistance among young adult offenders (Centre for Criminological Research, University of Sheffield). She returned to UCD in 2008 to take up a two-year post-doctoral fellowship, funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. During this time, she completed the "Crime, Desistance and Reintegration" study, which explored the psychosocial processes underpinning desistance from crime among adult male probationers. She joined the Sutherland School of Law as a lecturer in 2010.