After completing her PhD, Lamb joined the National Institute on Aging as a Harkness Fellow. She completed a degree in statistics at the University of Sheffield, and was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. She is a member of the Idea, Development, Exploration, Assessment, Long-term Follow-up, Improving the Quality of Research in Surgery collaboration. In 2008 the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence recognised Lamb as one of the top 200 investigators contributing to health research in the UK. In 2009 she was appointed chair of the National Institute for Health ResearchHealth Technology Assessment Commissioning Board. Lamb is a medical researcher at the University of Oxford. She is committed to improving the quality of medical trials to ensure better patient outcomes and value for money. Her career involves both clinical trials and musculoskeletal rehabilitation. She works on interventions that can improve the function of elderly people with cognitive impairments and comorbidities. She is particularly interested in minimally invasive approaches to target geriatric syndromes and manage severe injury. These include the rehabilitation of chronic conditions and non-medical healthcare contact. Lamb leads the Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences at the University of Oxford. In 2009 she identified that cast worn below the knee could improve severe ankle sprains, which account for 1.5 million emergency room attendances per year in the UK. In 2011 she was part of a National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guideline on the management of hip fractures. In 2012 she founded the Rehab Research lab group at the University of Oxford. She looked at various treatments for Whiplash and found that whilst physiotherapy has short-term benefits, including improvement of neck mobility, it is not cost-effective. She appeared on the Association of Trauma and Orthopaedic Chartered Physiotherapists Physio Matters Podcast in 2015. She believes that physios should be challenging low-quality, flawed, clinical trials and improve medical practice. She identified that a hand exercise programme improves quality and function for Rheumatoid arthritis patients. She has also found that education and targeted training can improve the physical activity of patients with lower back pain.
