Spending a year in England while her husband, Yale H. Ferguson, took a sabbatical from Rutgers University as a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, Ferguson rekindled her early passion for science. She met Stephen Hawking the first time after asking him for an interview while she was writing her first book "Black Holes in Spacetime", intended for children, and later wrote his biography "Stephen Hawking: Quest for a Theory of Everything". Hawking, in turn, later consulted her for his own book "The Universe in a Nutshell". In Cambridge, Ferguson met further renowned scientists including the physicist Brian Pippard.