Derry conducts research in natural language processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), with a focus on machine learning, deep learning, and large language models (LLMs) applications in multilingual NLP. Her studies include machine translation (MT), which demonstrates how to leverage well-annotated languages to improve the translation of less-annotated ones and how images, related tasks, data augmentation, and LLMs can be used to improve the representation and translation of languages with little training data. Her research also includes improvement of LLMs performance through self-consistency, critiques, contrastive learning, and reasoning.

Through interdisciplinary collaborations, Derry's studies include the applications of NLP and AI to public health and communication and journalism, in detecting and analysing how articles in traditional and emerging media on various public health issues or public affairs are written and framed. Derry has also conducted research on analysing bias and misinformation, within AI models and in public communications.

Derry has a postdoc from University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in Language Technologies from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. She received her Bachelor and Master’s degrees in Computer Science from the National University of Singapore.