Dowling's research career has been at University of Cambridge starting as a research fellow in 1977[REF] but she has held visiting posts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Jerome C Hunsaker Visiting Professor, 1999) and at the California Institute of Technology (Moore Distinguished Scholar 2001) [REF].
On 3 February 2012, the oil company BP announced that Dowling was to become a non-executive director with immediate effect [REF].