Since completion of her PhD at Flinders University in the area of food policy, Emma has developed a diverse set of qualitative and quantitative research skills through working in numerous research areas across Australia. Her PhD research spanned the topics of food labelling regulation, the sociology of trust and food systems, and utilized critical theoretical approaches such as Colebatch's social constructionism and Bacchi's policy analysis method.

Reflecting her undergraduate training in nutrition and dietetics, she recently worked in nutrition assessment and improvement in remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory as a Senior Research Associate with Menzies School of Health Research and now Monash University. She has also worked for Flinders University to run a democratic deliberation study around consumer trust in food systems, assist in the analysis and reporting of a qualitative four-nation international comparison study and consulted on several systematic reviews of literature.

Her current position at Flinders returns her focus to consumer trust in food, while she continues her work in Indigenous child nutrition through Monash University.