 She quickly found a new untenured research associate role under James Whittenberger , Chair of Physiology at Harvard School of Public Health , working with Dr. Jere Mead . She continued the research on air pollution , which she began under Drinker , until she left the school in 1977 . Partly because of the difficulty in obtaining tenure at Harvard , both for herself and for her colleague Sheldon Murphy , and partly because she needed to work with engineers to produce suitable combustion products , she moved her research to the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT ) and accepted a promotion to lecturer , securing funding for 12 years . When she moved , her new focus was the role of metals in the inhalation of sulfuric acid . Dissatisfied with the attention the research received at MIT , she moved to the Institute of Environmental Medicine at New York University in 1989 as a senior research scientist , where she remained until her retirement in 1996 . 
