She is a nationally-recognized scholar and expert on urban poverty, social policy, HIV/AIDS, non-profit and government organizations focusing on low-income families; and race, class, and gender. Her first book, The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2009), was a finalist for the 2009 C. Wright Mills Book Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and the 2011 Max Weber Book Award from the American Sociological Association.