By background a physician and historian, her main research interest is the history of diseases. In particular, she has been interested in how diseases come into being and pass away, how they have been defined and classified, and how borders between the normal and pathological have been drawn in particular historical periods. Her broader research interests are the history of reproduction and, most recently, the history of antibiotic resistance and the history of microbes. Among her recent publications are "Naming and Classifying Diseases in the Eighteenth Century" in ARV (2016) and (with Scott Podolsky) "Futures and their uses. Antibiotics and Therapeutic Revolutions," in Jeremy A. Greene; Elizabeth Siegel Watkins & Flurin Condrau (ed.), Therapeutic Revolutions: Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century. University of Chicago Press (2016).