Franz is a medical sociologist and health services researcher whose research and teaching focus on health disparities, population health initiatives, community-based engagement, and narrative medicine. She also has interests in the intersection of religious beliefs, health care utilization, and health policy preferences.

She also holds adjunct appointments in the Departments of Classics and World Religions and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ohio University. She received an M.A. in religious studies from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Miami.

Franz has worked both domestically and internationally on community-based research projects and has published extensively in peer reviewed journals and books on the theory and development of community-based partnerships to address critical health needs such as opioid abuse.

Her co-authored book, Narrative Medicine and Community-based Health Care and Planning was published by Springer in 2017. She co-edited Not Far from Me: Stories of Opioids and Ohio which compiles first-person experiences of the opioid epidemic in Ohio. Currently, she is working on a co-authored book on hospital-community relations in three urban communities for the University of Chicago Press.