Fox returned to Smith in 1975 to be awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree and in 1980 as a visiting William Allen Neilson Professor of Sociology and Anthropology.
As a visiting professor, she taught courses and delivered a lecture series entitled, “Life, Death, and Modern Medicine.” [2] Following her long bout with polio, Fox and her family ventured to Southern California for the summer of 1946.
[5] After graduating from Smith College, Fox entered the Department of Social Relations of Harvard University in pursuit of a Ph.D. in sociology.
To start she was interested in researching Belgians because they often return to Belgium after attending medical school in the United States.
In this essay, she described Belgium as particularistic due to society being divided into distinct groups – by social class, religion, political affiliation, language, and region.
Fox noted this particularism creates labels that effect Belgian’s education and research opportunities as well as medical access.
[9] To develop a deeper understanding of the Belgian society, Fox travelled to Belgium’s former colony, Zaire, which today is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Central Africa.
[10] Previous work in medical sociology and cultural immersion in Belgium was pertinent to her decision to pursue the endeavor to study the multidimensional problems within MSF.
The end goal of the project was to hopefully de-stigmatize how the homeless were seen by the general public and to transfer the program to municipal authorities and the Department of Health in Moscow.
MSF-B also tried persuading the Kemerovo government and the Ministry of Justice to adopt the TB control strategy that the World Health Organization (WHO) uses, DOTS.
The "Caucasus Project" aimed to provide medical assistance and psychosocial care, food, and shelter to thousands of civilians in Chechnya and Ingushetia.
[14] After observing the work done by MSF in Russia, Fox moved onto field research in Cape Town, South Africa.
The MSF program in Khayelitsha aimed to integrate a regimen of antiretroviral therapy (ART) to eventually have the community have maximized access to treatment through a primary care infrastructure.
Additionally, it geared toward breaking down the stigma associated with having the disease by building up "treatment literacy" and community education to lower the transmission.
Because the pandemic scale of HIV/AIDS requires long-term surveillance of communities such as Khayelitsha, Fox had the opportunity to make many successive trips to Cape Town, where she observed the evolution of the program.
She draws systematically and imaginatively upon anthropological, psychological, historical, and biological insights and integrates observations and analyses from her own studies in American, Western European, and Central African societies.”[17] Fox went on to combine ethnography with history in her study of the development of the Congolese medical profession (1968).