She developed a method for growing fowlpox outside of a live chicken alongside Ernest William Goodpasture.

[1][2] Her research greatly facilitated the rapid advancement in the study of viruses.

[7] While working with her husband and Goodpasture, she conducted studies in the "nature, infectivity, and purification of fowl-pox virus, and the character of the changes it induced on experimental infection of fowls," which became the forerunner in the cultivation of viruses.

[8] Woodruff was a regional chair of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in her later years.

[9][10] She married Charles Eugene ("Gene") Woodruff on 25 August 1927.