Kastner is a Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at Princeton University. She has studied thalamic function since graduate school. Among other contributions, she was the first to demonstrate involvement of the human thalamus in cognition and to establish a function for higher-order thalamus in organizing cortical networks. Kastner has published extensively on the topic. Kastner is an expert in high-resolution imaging of the human thalamus and in recording simultaneously from several nodes of thalamo-cortical networks in non-human primates.