Her specialties were protozoology and parasitology; early work with ciliate parasites, including the one responsible for blackhead disease in the domesticated turkey, lay the groundwork for her later research.

Later she studied drug resistance in this parasite, research that proved valuable to the British military in World War II.

Bishop also discovered the protozoan Pseudotrichomonas keilini and worked with Aedes aegypti, a malaria vector, as part of her research on the disease.

[2] At an early age, Bishop wished to continue the family business, though her interests quickly turned to the sciences after her father encouraged her to go to university.

[5] Bishop was recognised at the college for her distinctive hats, which she would wear to breakfast every day before walking to the Molteno Institute, a distance of 3.5 miles (5.6 km).

[3] Towards the end of her life, when her mobility was limited by arthritis, Bishop developed a fascination with the history of biology and medicine, although she never published in that field.

During her undergraduate years, under the tutelage of the helminthologist R.A. Wardle and the protozoologist Geoffrey Lapage, Bishop studied ciliates acquired from local ponds.

[1][8] Two years into her undergraduate career,[1] after winning the John Dalton Natural History Prize awarded by the university,[8] she began work for another protozoologist, a Fellow of the Royal Society, Sydney J.

[1] Bishop's undergraduate work with Hickson was her first major research effort, concerning the reproduction of Spirostomum ambiguum, a large ciliate that has been described as "wormlike".

[1] Under Dobell, Bishop studied parasitic amoebae found in the human gastrointestinal tract,[6] focusing on the species responsible for amoebic dysentery, Entamoeba histolytica.

Dobell, Bishop, and Patrick Laidlaw studied the effects of amoebicides like emetine for the purpose of treating amoebal diseases.

[1] Her work there was an extension of her research with Dobell, as she studied nuclear division in parasitic flagellates and amoebae of diverse species, including both vertebrates and invertebrates.

Bishop also discovered a new species, Pseudotrichomonas keilini, which she named to acknowledge her colleague David Keilin, as well as the parasite's resemblance to the genus Trichomonas.

[6] Between 1937 and 1938, Bishop studied the effects of various factors, including different substances in blood and different temperatures, on the feeding behaviour of the chicken malaria (Plasmodium gallinaceum) vector, Aedes aegypti.

Her research aided the British war effort because the most prevalent antimalarial, quinine, was difficult to obtain due to the Japanese occupation of the Dutch West Indies.

Her in vitro research was proven accurate when the drugs she studied were used to treat patients who had tertian malaria, a form of the illness in which the paroxysm of fever occurs every third day.

[5] Her lifelong association with Girton College prompted the placement of a plaque commemorating her life, whose inscription, quoted from Virgil, reads "Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas", Latin for "Happy is the one who has been able to get to know the causes of things".