Upon completing her PhD, Kremen spent 10 years working for nonprofit organizations in conservation biology.[2] She studied the impacts of Deforestation in Madagascar, on species distributions with a Web-based biodiversity database.[3] Kremen eventually returned to North American and accepted a faculty position at Princeton University for four years before becoming a professor of environmental science, policy and management at University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley).[2]
During her early tenure at UC Berkeley, Kremen also served as a member on the Committee on Status of Pollinators where she led the first global study on crop production that is reliant upon animal pollination.[4] In recognition of her research, she was named a 2007 MacArthur Fellows Program, which came with an unrestricted $500,000 award for the next five years.[3] In the same year, Kremen was also awarded a Hellman Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences for her project "How does Biological Diversity Promote Ecosystem Services: a Mechanistic Study of Almond Crop Pollination in a Changing California Landscape."[5] As an associate professor of environmental science, policy and management, Kremen led a study in 2011 which concluded that farmers could become more cost-efficient if they relied less on renting honey bees.[6] In recognition of her academic achievements, Kremen was elected a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences in 2013[7] and appointed Editor in Chief of the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems.[8]
In 2019, Kremen left UC Berkeley to become one of the first University of British Columbia (UBC) President’s Excellence Chair in Biodiversity Studies at the UBC Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability.[9] While serving in this role, she was awarded an honorary degree from the American Museum of Natural History in "recognition of her extraordinary contributions to science, education and society."[10] In 2020, Kremen was the recipient of the Volvo Environment Prize for "exploring the way to a sustainable world."[11]
