Saraswati has worked in malaria research since 1993 when she was a Medical Research Technologist at the Department of Immunology at the US-military international biomedical research laboratory in Jakarta. 

In her early career, she investigated immunological responses during antimalarial drug prophylaxis of falciparum and vivax malaria in Papua. She received training on the usage of microsatellites for Plasmodium vivax genotyping from MORU (Thailand), knob-associated histidine-rich protein PCR from A-Star (Singapore), development and optimization Luminex assay in multi-antigens for leptospira, rickettsia and Q-fever.

She and her colleagues have run hundreds of blood samples gathered from field sites to determine parasite infections and genotype parasite diversity.