She is a cultural anthropologist who has had rather diverse research interests, but has a concentration in the study of human and wild primate interactions. Her book Kinship with Monkeys: The Guaja Foragers of Eastern Amazonia (Columbia University Press 2003), explored a hunting and gathering group's relationships with monkeys in ecological, social, and symbolic domains of their culture. For the past several years, she has been investigating host-switching in human, ape, and monkey malarias from prehistory to present, with particular emphasis on environmental changes fostering malarial proliferation in all primates since the agricultural revolution.Her latest book release was centered on this topic entitled, The 10,000 Year Fever: The Historical Ecology of Human and Wild Primate Malarias.