During her research career, Henderson conducted pharmaceutical synthesis experiments in the Central Research and Development Department at DuPont.
Henderson published multiple articles on her scholarship, one in the Journal of Organic Chemistry and two in the Journal of the American Chemistry Society. She also received two patents for her work on analgesics (painkillers) and narcotic antagonists. These patents involved finding non-addictive elements of opiates that could be used in treating drug dependency. In medicinal chemistry, changing an existing compound slightly by substituting in fluorine has become a standard method in the hunt for new pharmaceuticals, as fluorine can enhance desired properties of certain drugs. Henderson's experiments, for which she earned her patents, substituted fluorine into painkillers to see if the resulting compounds exhibited analgesic effects without the negative addictive properties of the original compounds.
In 1969, DuPont acquired Endo Laboratories, which patented naltrexone, a drug antagonist. DuPont partnered with the National Institute on Drug Abuse to run naltrexone trials. Throughout this time, Henderson was employed by DuPont, and her work contributed to naltrexone becoming an FDA-approved treatment for drug and alcohol dependency in the 1980s and 1990s.
She moved into a recruiting role for DuPont and DuPont Merck, the joint venture of the DuPont Pharmaceutical Company and Merck & Co., after its formation in the early 1990s.
When Henderson left DuPont Merck, she became Program Manager of the federally-funded Upward Bound program at Delaware Community and Technical College. Upward Bound began as a product of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 in 1965 and is designed to assist high school students in completing their studies and preparing for college. Students involved in the program are from low-income households and households where the parents do not have college degrees. Henderson also taught a laboratory class at Neumann College in Aston, Pennsylvania.
In this clip, Rose Henderson discusses the pride in her accomplishments as a research chemist at DuPont and her post-DuPont career:
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