Now publishing as Joan Murrell Owens, she continued her laboratory work at the Smithsonian, classifying and studying button corals, while advancing to the rank of associate professor in the department of geology and geography at Howard University in 1986. She described the new genus Rhombopsammia and its two species in 1986, and added a new species to the genus Letepsammia in 1994, naming L. franki for her husband, Frank A. Owens.[1] Both genera are in the family Micrabaciidae.