Laura E. Hirshfield (Co-Founder & Executive Board Member) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Education and a faculty affiliate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In her work at UIC, Laura is lucky enough to work closely with medical students, residents, faculty, and graduate students (both in Sociology and in Health Professions Education). A sociologist and ethnographer by training, Laura is broadly interested in social interaction, identity, education, science, work/organizations, and medicine. Her research centers on gender and other forms of inequality in academic and clinical settings, particularly in the natural sciences and medicine.
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Kelly Underman (Co-Founder & Executive Board Member) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Drexel University and an affiliated faculty member in the Center for Science, Technology & Society at Drexel University. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She previously held a postdoctoral research assistantship in the Department of Medical Education at the University of Illinois School of Medicine. Her research interests in medical education include affect/emotion, socialization, and inequalities. Her work has appeared in Gender & Society, Social Science and Medicine, Sociological Forum, Social Studies of Science, and Sociology Compass.
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Alexandra H. Vinson (Co-Founder & Executive Board Member) is Assistant Professor of Learning Health Sciences in the Division of Professional Education at the University of Michigan. Her research examines how medical education evolves in response to changes in the organization and delivery of healthcare and the structure of the medical profession. She uses qualitative research methods, specifically ethnographic field methods, in her studies of work and educational settings. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology & Science Studies from the University of California, San Diego and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University.
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Tania M. Jenkins (Executive Board Member) is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University in 2016 and worked as a Canadian Institutes of Health Research postdoc at the University of Chicago from 2016-2017. Her research interests lie within medical sociology, gender, medical education, professions, social status, stratification, ethics, qualitative methodologies, and social theory. More specifically, her scholarship examines how and why status hierarchies are (re)produced in the medical profession and how they impact both doctors and patients. Her book, Doctors' Orders: Status Separation in American Residency Training (Columbia University Press, August 2020), examines status hierarchies in medical training between American MDs, and international and osteopathic medical graduates. Her latest research explores gender and mental health among residents, particularly in frontline specialties like internal and emergency medicine, where physicians are typically the most burnt out and unhappy in the profession.
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Lauren D. Olsen (Executive Board Member) is a medical sociologist who uses qualitative methods to study how educators, physicians, and policy makers apply knowledge to improve patient care and how the context in which these actors work impacts how they utilize humanistic and social scientific knowledge. She addresses questions about how these actors understand the sources of health and healthcare disparities in the U.S. patient population, how they decide what kinds of knowledge are clinically relevant, and how they reproduce forms of inequality in their educational materials and interactional processes – particularly racial inequality. Lauren recently joined Temple University as an Assistant Professor of Sociology.
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