Upon graduation from Harvard, Hammonds was invited to teach at MIT. While she was there, she was the founding director of MIT's center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology, and Medicine. She also helped organize the first national academic conference for black female scholars, Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Name 1894-1994 a national conference convened at MIT in 1994 to address historical and contemporary issues faced by African-American women in academia.
