She is a professor at ETH Zürich, where she is head of the Department of Health Sciences and Technology and leads the Applied Mechanobiology Laboratory.

In 1988 she won an Otto Hahn Medal for her doctoral work with Hans Kuhn at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen.

[2] In 2020, Vogel was appointed by European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth Mariya Gabriel to serve on an independent search committee for the next president of the European Research Council (ERC), chaired by Helga Nowotny.

[3] The direction of Vogel's work is to take microscopic pieces of living tissue and investigate their mechanical properties, with a view to developing new technologies.

Her interests include molecular self-assembly, cell adhesion, and the construction of biological minerals, materials, and tissues.