Graduating with a B.A. from Queen’s University at Kingston in 1962, Aziz set out for Europe, with India as her ultimate destination. Following the annexation of Tibet by China in 1959, tens of thousands of Tibetan refugees were arriving in India at that time, and Aziz joined various humanitarian projects assisting them. She worked in a Tibetan nunnery for a year, then joined the British Save the Children Fund (UK)'s school for Tibetan children in Shimla, India and was employed as its headmistress for three years. Motivated to learn more about the history and culture of Asian people she decided to study anthropology and was offered a graduate position to work with the eminent ethnologist in Himalayan Studies, Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). With funding from SOAS for her doctoral research, Aziz travelled to Nepal in late 1969 and settled in Solukhumbu to conduct fieldwork among Tibetan refugees from Dingri, SW Tibet. She remained there for more than a year, becoming a fluent Tibetan speaker. She was entrusted by Abbot Trulskik Rinpoche with photographing sacred Tibetan manuscripts connected with the 12th C. teacher PhaDampa Sangyas and then worked with Bhutanese scholars to have them printed for wide distribution. In 1974 she was awarded her D. Phil in Social Anthropology. In 1978, her first book Tibetan Frontier Famlies: Reflections of Three Generations from Dingri was published (translated into Chinese in 1981). In 2011 a new edition was published, updated with information based on Aziz's subsequent research between 1985 and 1987 in Tibet itself.