Before joining the faculty, she was at Agilent Laboratories where she conducted research in bio-informatics, employing knowledge discovery and data mining techniques. Prior to Agilent, Patricia worked at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories conducting computer science research in speech recognition, knowledge discovery, and data mining. She also led internal teams of consultants in advancing software engineering and business management process practices within Hewlett-Packard worldwide, specializing in the area of software reuse methods.