She is recognised internationally for her multidisciplinary research into kidney and related chronic disease, particularly in high-risk populations. She was among the first to describe kidney disease, independent of diabetes, in Native Americans, in studies of Zuni, Rio Grande Pueblo, Navajo and Apache Indians in the Southwest of the USA. She promotes an integrated view of non-communicable chronic diseases, and interpretation of health profiles in multi-determinant frameworks. She was the first to demonstrate the contribution of low birthweight to kidney disease in Australia, manifest in remote living Australian Aborigines, and then drove demonstrations of birthweight’s effects on health profiles in mainstream Australians through the AUSDIAB study. She showed that screening and treatment of preterminal kidney disease in remote-living Australian Aboriginal reduces dialysis needs, deaths and costs; that work has helped transform Australian Aboriginal health services, and underpins many screening and treatment programs globally. She has tested the preventative potential of pharmacologic treatment with perindopril on new onset chronic disease in currently unaffected people, showing a possible protective effect in women. She described the transformation of mortality in remote-living Aborigines over the last 50 years, and the links to current health profiles and population size and structure. She and colleagues have conducted the only nationwide study of kidney biopsies in Australia, defining the high rates of enlargement and scarring of kidney filters. She, with Bertram and Hughson, have also defined, in a series of >450 autopsies, encompassing five ethnic groups in three continents, the range of nephron number and glomerular volume in normal kidneys, and the structural features marking heightened susceptibility to kidney disease and high blood pressure. The relationship of birthweight to nephron number was discovered in that work.