She also serves as an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health[2] and as a member of the editorial board of Environment International.

[6] After she became director of the NIEHS, she declared that she "plan[s] to create a holistic approach that can deal with the biggies, from complex mixtures of toxic chemicals to climate change.

[8] Birnbaum retired as directory of NIEHS and NTP on October 3, 2019, but continues to perform laboratory research part-time at the institute.

[15] In 2013, Birnbaum published an article in Trends in Endocrinology and Metabolism which contended that diseases that are becoming more common, such as prostate cancer, must be caused by environmental factors rather than genetic ones.

[16] This paper prompted two Republican congressmen, Paul Broun and Larry Bucshon, to write a letter to the National Institutes of Health in which they contended that some of her "statements sound less like a presentation of scientific data and more like an opinion.