Working with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, she spent 10 months in the Democratic Republic of Congo studying Bonobos, a species of great ape as genetically close to humans as the Common Chimpanzee, in order to make comparisons between the behaviors of man and ape.

She wrote an in-depth report on killer bees encountered during her studies in Costa Rica, and has also spent time studying the yearly Cherry Blossom experience in Kyoto, Japan.

In 2003, Woods won the Australasian Science Award for journalism. In 2007, her children’s book on space, It's True! Space turns you into spaghetti, was named an Acclaimed Book by the UK Royal Society and shortlisted for the Royal Society’s Junior Science Book Prize.