Her work examines social inequality and its relationship to health with a focus on neighborhood, race, and aging and the life course. She brings urban sociological theory and methods to research on health, examining outcomes such as asthma prevalence, physical activity, mortality during the 1995 Chicago heat wave, recovery after Superstorm Sandy, and the evolution of a new community called Lakeside. She also focuses on the development of new methods to define and measure neighborhoods and social networks with smartphone-related data collection.