While involved in the research for her doctorate, Dahl became a pioneer in the field of logic programming, and created the first program to utilize logic programming to determine queries and commands that were issued in a human language. Dahl's research and methodologies became multi-disciplinary including Computational Linguistics, Computational Molecular Biology, and Artificial Intelligence. She became an associate professor at Simon Fraser University in 1982, and became a full professor there in 1991. Dahl is a woman pioneer in a male-dominated field. She fought gender inequality while she was a professor at Simon Frasier University, including getting childcare expenses reimbursed while traveling for out-of-town lectures, and starting a university-wide investigation into women's lower salaries. After Simon Frasier University refused to reimburse her $17 for childcare expenses while she was guest-speaking at a lecture, she went first to her department and then Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada with her protest, which ended with the NSERC changing their policy to make childcare a covered expense for researchers they funded. She has worked with IBM, Vancouver Software Labs, and International Artificial Intelligence as a consultant. In her work with IBM, she negotiated a record-breaking research contract. She served as president of the Association of Logic Programming from 2001–2005. She retired from teaching at Simon Fraser University in 2013.
Research
Dahl's research was focused on "bridging the gap between the formal and the humanistic sciences, and to achieve more human-like communication with computers." Dahl has research that has had theoretical and practical use in logic, linguistics, intelligence, and molecular biology.
Most Significant Scholarly Publications
Language-proficient Knowledge Bases and the World Wide Web
Intelligent methodologies for Life Sciences, in particular Molecular Biology
Properties as constraints—from parsing to cognitive modeling
Integrating high level methodologies into a new language: HYPROLOG
Honors and awards
Dahl has received many honors and awards in her career. In 1994, Dahl received the Calouste Gulbenkian Award for Science and Technology. In 1997, she was named as one of the founding members in logic programming by the Association for Logic Programming. In 2009, she received the Best Promising Paper Award at the Third International Work-Conference on the Interplay between Natural and Artificial Computation. In 2008–2011, she received the Marie Curie Chair of Excellence Award from the European Commission.
Books
Abramson, H. & Dahl, V. Logic Grammars. Springer.
Literary works
Prose
'. First Prize in the Prose Category, Cecilia Lamont Literary Contest.
