Her research activities center around language independent and language adaptive speech recognition but also include large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems, human-machine interfaces for spontaneous and conversational speech, speech translation, as well as language and speaker identification approaches. With a particular area of expertise in multilingual approaches, she performs research on portability of speech processing systems to many different languages.

In 2001 Tanja Schultz was awarded with the FZI price for her outstanding Ph.D. thesis on language independent and language adaptive speech recognition. In 2002 she received the Allen Newell Medal for Research Excellence from Carnegie Mellon for her contribution to Speech-to-Speech Translation and the ISCA best paper award for her publication on language independent acoustic modeling. In 2005 she was awarded the Carnegie Mellon Language Technologies Institute Junior Faculty Chair. Tanja Schultz is the author of more than 80 articles published in books, journals, and proceedings. She is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, the European Language Resource Association, the Society of Computer Science (GI) in Germany, and currently serves on several program and review panels.