Her research focuses on intellectual history and the history of science in the twentieth-century United States, with a particular emphasis on competing visions of politics, economics, and ethics in times of social upheaval. She is the author of Scientists at War: The Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research (2015), which examines ethical debates among scientists involved in military advising and research from Sputnik to Star Wars. This book won the Society for U.S. Intellectual History’s book award and, as a dissertation, the Society of American Historians' Allan Nevins Prize. Bridger is currently at work on a history of American scientists in the 1970s as they debated what counts as science and who counts as a scientist.