The current focus of her research is to determine under which conditions an autoimmune attack on neurons can occur. The research focuses on the neurologic sleep disorder narcolepsy, where the hypocretin/orexin producing neurons in hypothalamus are lost. As a post doc she discovered that autoreactive CD4+ T lymphocytes are central to the disease pathogenesis, but the mechanism leading to neuronal loss is still a mystery. Her current lab studies the details of the possible neuron-immune system interaction using both cell culture and animal models. A part of this work includes functional studies of immune related risk variants in narcolepsy, in particular P2RY11.