[6] She then went to work with Lucy Shapiro at Stanford Medical School on a fellowship from the European Molecular Biology Organization.
[6][5] As of 2018, Jacobs-Wagner holds an endowed chair in Yale Medical School and is director of their Microbial Institute.
[2][6] Christine Jacobs-Wagner's major breakthrough has been the discovery that the tiny cells of bacteria such as Caulobacter, Escherichia coli, and Borrelia are not simply bags of biochemicals but instead program the locations of their protein components via their regulatory systems.
[2] She also discovered the protein crescentin, which forms bacterial intermediate filaments, structures once thought to occur only in eukaryotic cells.
[2] The current focus of her laboratory's work is to discover regulation of the times and places for critical components of the DNA replication and cell division processes so that proliferation control can be understood.