Carling joined the Mitrovica group at Harvard University's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the summer of 2012 after receiving her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Toronto. One of the main goals of Carling’s work is to answer the important climatological question: what are the various contributors to the observed changes in sea level? Her research focuses on using statistical techniques to better understand global mean sea level during current and past warm periods, and to develop the tools necessary to extract source information from historical sea-level records. Understanding how past sea level has changed in response to rising surface temperatures is a critical step in our ability to predict sea-level rise into the next century and beyond.