For the past 15 years, she has studied stress in the lab and in the field, using naturalistic stressors, and associations with an early aging syndrome. She examines how stress processes lead to early disease precursors, focusing on overeating, abdominal obesity, and immune cell aging. She has found that people’s propensity to be stress reactive, psychologically or in terms of cortisol reactivity, is associated with overeating, abdominal obesity, and accelerated cell aging. With UCSF colleagues Elizabeth Blackburn and Jue Lin, she found that stress perceptions and stress arousal are related to telomere shortness and dampened telomerase activity.