She has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and specializes in the study of political controversies surrounding changes in the systems that produce food and energy. She is the author of Seeds, Science, and Struggle: The Global Politics of Transgenic Crops (MIT, 2012) and numerous articles on science, technology, the environment, and social protest. Her current research, the Watershed Knowledge Mapping Project, looks at civil society organizations that are attempting to monitor the impacts of shale gas development on surface water quality and how these efforts are transforming what is known and unknown about this controversial new form of energy production.