Barran stayed with Stace for three years after completing her PhD in 1998. In 2001 Barran joined the
University of California, Santa Barbara, working as a
postdoctoral fellow with Mike Bowers. She was interested in the structure and stability of small molecules in the gas phase. She looked at how
Ion-mobility spectrometry could be used to identify conformation. In 2005 she was awarded the 10th
Desty Memorial prize for her innovations in Separation Science. She was made a Senior Lecturer in 2009. She worked on mass spectrometry techniques that can be used to evaluate conformational change, aggregation and intrinsic conformation. She investigated
mass spectrometry for therapeutics for pre-fibrillar aggregation. She helped to establish the
Scottish Instrumentation and Resource Centre for Advanced Mass Spectrometry at the
University of Edinburgh. In 2013 Barran was appointed to the
Manchester Institute of Biotechnology as a Chair in Mass Spectrometry sponsored by
Waters Corporation. She led an EPSRC platform grant to study the structure-activity relationships of
Beta defensins. They are interested in a proteins structure and how it changes in an effort to relate that to their function.
Ion-mobility spectrometry–mass spectrometry can be used to look at the temperature dependent rotationally averaged collision cross-section of gas-phase ions of proteins. In 2014 she was awarded a
Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council grant to study the interactions of proteins with other proteins. Barran serves on the editorial board of the
International Journal of Mass Spectrometry. She was included in the
page of Perditas created by
Perdita Stevens.
Parkinson's disease Barran has been working with
Joy Milne to search for odorous biomarkers of Parkinson's disease. By smelling skin swabs, Milne says she can differentiate between people with and without Parkinson's disease. She says she identified changes in her husband's scent before he was formally diagnosed with
Parkinson's disease, which he died of in 2015. Barran received ethical approval for her work of the skin metabolites of Parkinson's in 2015, allowing them to work with
Parkinson's UK to conduct a larger study. In 2018 Milne travelled to the Tanzanian training centre APOPO to check whether she could smell
Tuberculosis. Barran's work on Parkinson's is sponsored by
The Michael J. Fox Foundation. In 2022, Barran and others published a study of a method to detect Parkinson's disease by analysing
sebum using mass spectrometry. == Awards ==