For over 30 years, she has led multicenter and international studies to develop clinical and neuropathologic diagnostic criteria for parkinsonian and/or dementia neurodegenerative disorders (progressive supranuclear palsy, corticobasal degeneration, multiple system atrophy, dementia with Lewy bodies, Parkinson disease (PD), PD-mild cognitive impairment, and PD dementia), to identify robust diagnostic biomarkers, conduct symptomatic and biologic therapeutic trials, and epidemiologic, genetic, and clinical-pathologic correlation studies.
Since entering the National Academy of Medicine in Uruguay as a foreign scientist, Dr. Litvan has been awarded the NIH Merit Award and American Academy of Neurology (AAN) Movement Disorder Research Award, published more than 380 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, is the senior editor of four books with an h-index of 102, and among the top 1% of most cited researchers worldwide by Web of Science 2019-2021. In 2023 she was named among Eight UC San Diego Researchers '1,000 Best Female Scientists in the World' by Research.com.