[1] Upon finishing her post-doctoral fellowship, Makowski Hayes joined the faculty in the Division of Biochemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) and established her lab in The Michael Hooker Research Center.
[3] In 2011, she showed that feeding the rats a Western pattern diet, consisting of highly palatable, energy-dense foods, caused severe weight gain, tissue inflammation and diabetes.
[4] She also demonstrated that sugar intake could play an important role in the promotion of obesity-related insulin resistance[5] and found a correlation between weight loss and a reducing in the progression of basal-like breast cancer.
[6] Makowski Hayes continued to work alongside Troester during her tenure at UNC and co-launched the myBCrisk website to help women learn about their risk for breast cancer.
[7] She also accepted an assistant professor position at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center where she received funding from the American Heart Association Beginning Grant-in-Aid for her project "The Role of Macrophage Substrate Metabolism in Atherosclerosis.