After the completion Sonia dedicated 10 years to applied research topics, constantly working as a consultant across academic and non-academic institutions, in collaboration with private companies and public authorities. Some of the activities carried on during this period are: detection of illegal landfills using remote sensing; use of optical remote sensing for the delineation of surface peat deposits; study of the hydrology of the Venice Lagoon subsurface using airborne electromagnetics (AEM) (the private company Aarhus Geophysics performed the analysis of the AEM data); calibration of a hydrodynamic model of the Venice lagoon using satellite thermal data; mapping seagrass species present in the Venice Lagoon using satellite data. In 2011 Silvestri decided to go back full time to academic activities and moved to Duke University, United States. Since 2017 she holds a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship at the University of Padova