Adjunct Professor of Mathematical Geography and Population-Environment Dynamics, School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS), Arlinghaus' scholarly interests center on finding real-world applications for pure mathematics. Often, these theoretical projects have, as one component, a community service aspect: from the local to the international. In recent years, she has found Google 3D SketchUP and Google Earth, along with Story Maps and other free web-based GIS software, to be exciting ways to confront theory with practice!

More specifically, her mathematical background involves graduate study in the Ph.D. program in Mathematics at the University of Chicago (mentor, Saunders Mac Lane) and also in the Ph.D. programs in Mathematics at the University of Toronto (Advisor, H. S. M. Coxeter) and Wayne State University (mentor Geert Prins). Generally, Arlinghaus' interests in that arena focus on synthetic geometry and graph theory. Her Ph.D. is in "Location Theory, or more broadly viewed, Theoretical Geography." Waldo R. Tobler was her advisor-- Tobler and John D. Nystuen served as her dissertation co-chairs. She enjoys doing interdisciplinary scholarly research that draws these two disciplines together and views publication, particularly forms that take advantage of current technology, to be an optimum way to share results among a disparate group of scholars around the world.  Many of her works are archived in University of Michigan Library persistent online archive, Deep Blue, in the Collection of Mathematical Geography (https://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/58219)