Karen Marie Strom carried out pioneering work on the processes of star formation. She led or contributed to numerous papers on T Tauri stars and their circumstellar disks, envelopes, and outflows, including studies of nebular Herbig-Haro objects. She also carried out research on other aspects of stellar evolution, as well as important work investigating the stellar populations of other galaxies. With her colleagues, including her husband Stephen, she conducted some of the first infrared surveys of star-forming regions and developed early approaches to image processing, work that contributed to the development, at the National Optical Astronomical Observatory, of the Image Reduction and Analysis Facility (IRAF), a general purpose software system for the reduction and analysis of astronomical data.