She is the Director of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University and a visiting professor at King's College London.

[2] During this time, she published her first book AIDS and the Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference, which was widely accepted and positively reviewed.

[2] In 2001, Waldby moved to the United Kingdom and joined Brunel University as the Director of Center for Research in Innovation, Culture and Technology.

Dowsett wrote that "AIDS and the Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference represents a significant attempt to build a bridge between science and culture, and to indicate that the chasm between cultural, political and social understandings of the pandemic, and the biomedical understanding of the event of an HIV infection and its syndromic consequence AIDS, is not as wide as one would think.

"[14] Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism, Waldby's third book, co-authored with Robert Mitchell, was published in 2006.

However, she demonstrated that this dichotomy, which structures the majority of bioethical and policy debate, is quite inadequate to understanding the centrality of speculative and promissory forms of value such as patenting of living material in contemporary tissue economies.

Informed consent in this sense becomes a crucial step in securing the conditions for the establishment of the recipient’s intellectual property claims, and hence right of deployment over future value creation.

Writing a positive review, Steve Chasin called the book "a valuable contribution to understanding the landscape of today's rapidly developing biotechnology industry.

[18] In a review of the book in International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, Emma Ryman wrote that "Providing historical context together with insightful analysis of the rise of clinical labor, Cooper and Waldby give readers a wide ranging, critical look at the role of this hidden workforce within the contemporary bioeconomy.

[18] She developed the second framework in her book, The Oocyte Economy: The Changing Meaning of Human Eggs in Fertility, Assisted Reproduction and Stem Cell Research.