She served as the Co-Chair of the Bi-partisan National Commission on Hunger.  The commission was tasked with advising Congress and the United States Department of Agriculture about how to end hunger in America. She has testified before the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives numerous times and has served as an advisor to Sesame Street and to the Institute of Medicine. She is author of The Painful Truth about Hunger in America (The MIT Press), and she has published over 60 peer-reviewed publications, many book chapters, testimonies, and op eds. She has informed and appeared in documentaries such as the feature-length Place at the Table about hunger in the US. and Crowd and the Cloud citizen science with Members of Witnesses to document water quality in Philadelphia.  Her awards include the 40 under 40 award in Philadelphia, Manna, unsung hero award from Women’s Way, and the Hod Ogden award for public health practice.

As a full, tenured professor of Health Management and Policy at Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University, she founded the Center for Hunger-Free Communities in 2004. Through the Center she ran many programs such as the EAT Café, a pay-what you can restaurant, Witnesses to Hunger, an award-winning truth-telling movement to increase women's participation in the national dialogue on hunger and poverty, and the Building Wealth and Health Network, designed to help people heal from the violence of poverty and build wealth  For 15 years she was a Co-PI with Children’s HealthWatch, a multi-site research network that that seeks to inform researchers and policy makers about how to address the health consequences of economic insecurity. She has taught undergraduate and graduate-level courses such as Public Health and Human Rights, Abolition Frameworks for Public Health, Health Disparities, Health Behavior, Community Health, and the Politics of Food, Gender, and Race.