Ivy is currently an assistant professor in the Physiology department at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Her research focuses on undertanding the regulation of voltage gated calcium channels, and how these regualtory processes are disrupted by gentic mutations. She began doing ion channel research as an undergraduate at UNC-Chapel Hill when she spent two summers as an intern at Merck. In 2000, she joined the Ion Channel department at Merck, where she worked on drug discovery and implementation of automated patch clamping. In 2003, Ivy joined the biomedical engineering graduate program at Johns Hopkins, where she earned the Alicia Showalter Reynolds Young Investigator award in 2009 for her work on voltage gated calcium channels. In addition to research, Ivy spent two years as a Peace Corp Volunteer in Malawi, Africa teaching science, health, and AIDS education.