Dr. Brig-Ortiz's current work is a comparative analysis of water management and urban public health in three nineteenth-century South African port cities: Cape Town, Port Elizabeth (Gqeberha), and Durban. By exploring how different racial communities brought their own water cultures and behaviors into each city, and how the British colonial government responded to them, she explores how British scientific water management and infrastructure came to dominate the urban southern African landscape while shaping water as a critical public health concern. Dr. Brig-Ortiz's past work analyzed the role of animal and climatic experimentation in relation to the production and distribution of smallpox vaccination in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century."