She was awarded an inaugural Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship in 2001, and took this up at Melbourne and continued with this work at Monash university when she moved there in 2005.
She is a specialist in inequality, social exclusion and marginality,[1] the social determinants of infectious and chronic disease,[2] gender and sexuality, immigration, ethnicity and inequality, in Australia, Southeast and East Asia (including Malaysia, China, Thailand, the Philippines and Japan), South Africa and Ghana, and most recently in the Solomon Islands.
In 2010 Manderson and fellow researcher Carolyn Smith-Morris edited the book Chronic Conditions, Fluid States: Chronicity and the Anthropology of Illness [3] She was the editor of the 2011 book Surface Tensions: Surgery, Bodily Boundaries and the Social Self, as well as Technologies of Sexuality, Identity and Sexual Health in the same year.
[4][5] Manderson was chairperson of the Program Committee and a member of the Board of Trustees of the World Academy of Art and Science 2010–2011, In 2012 she co-edited the book Flows of Faith: Religious Reach and Community in Asia and the Pacific with Wendy Smith and Matt Tomlinson, and Reframing Disability and Quality of Life: A Global Perspective with Narelle Warren.
In 2014 she is a member of the steering committee for a project of the Academy of Science of Australia on population, equity, climate change and sustainability.