As a graduate student at MIT, she conducted her doctoral work under Dr. Rainer Weiss, where Mavalvala developed a prototype laser interferometer for detecting gravitational waves.[17] After graduate school, she was a postdoctoral researcher and then a research scientist at the California Institute of Technology, starting her work with cosmic microwave background,[18] and then eventually working on the LIGO.[3] Mavalvala mainly focuses on two fields of physics: Gravitational Waves Astrophysics and quantum measurement science.[19] Dr. Mavalvala joined the MIT physics faculty in 2002.[1] In 2017 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.[20]