Melanie Jeske is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of California at San Francisco. Situated at the intersection of medical sociology and science and technology studies, her research explores the social, political and ethical dimensions of knowledge systems, emergent biotechnologies, and biomedical expertise. Her dissertation research explores the politics and values of translational medicine, and goals of commercialization in biomedical research. Melanie’s research has been published in journals including BioSocieties, Social Science & Medicine, and Engaging Science, Technology, and Society.
Lei Jin is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Jockey Club School of Public Health and Primary Care at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD at the University of Chicago and was a Robert Wood Johnson postdoctoral fellow in the Health Policy Program at Harvard University. Her research interests include social disparities in health and well-being, health lifestyle, healthcare policy and healthcare professions. Her work has appeared in prestigious international journals such as Demography, Social Science Research, Social Science & Medicine, and the American Behavioral Scientist. Professor Jin’s current projects examine the following topics: (1) social disparities in health lifestyle in transitional China; (2) psychological well-being and power perception in different social and political contexts across the world; and (3) professionalization and professionalism among physicians in China’s public hospitals.
Patrick M. Krueger is Associate Professor in Health & Behavioral Sciences at the University of Colorado Denver, and research faculty at the Population Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on race/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in health, health behaviors, and mortality. His current hobby is reciting pi backward.
Laura Mamo (PhD Sociology) is Professor of Public Health at San Francisco State University. Her research focuses on the technoscientific, biomedical, and social and cultural dimensions of health inequalities largely in the US. She is the author of Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience (Duke University Press 2007); co-editor of Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness in the US (Duke University Press 2010); and co-author of Living Green: Communities That Sustain (New Society Press 2009). She is also a founding member of the Beyond Bullying Project, a multi-media and ethnographic project studying the circulation of sexuality at school. Her research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the US National Institutes of Health.
Jane D. McLeod is Provost Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. Her research traverses social psychology, medical sociology, sociology of mental health, stratification, and the life course. She is currently working on projects concerned with the social psychology of inequality, the college experiences of youth on the autism spectrum, and mental health inequalities.
James Nazroo is Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester, UK, where he is Deputy Director (formerly founding Director) of the Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity. His research focuses on inequality, social justice and stratification in relation to ethnicity and aging. His research on ethnic inequalities has spanned more than twenty-five years and demonstrates how health and underlying socioeconomic inequalities are shaped by racism.
Hyeyoung Oh Nelson is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Health and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Colorado-Denver. She is a medical sociologist and qualitative researcher. Her research interests include the medical profession, health care organizations, the doctor-patient relationship, racial health disparities, and maternal health. Her work has been published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Sociology of Health & Illness, and Qualitative Health Research.
Sarah Nettleton is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, University of York, UK. Over three decades her research has focused on embodiment, experiences of illness, health promotion, recovery, sleep and more lately architecture in the context of health and social care. She is author of the textbook Sociology of Health and Illness, 4th edition (Polity 2020).
Alexandra “Xan” Nowakowski is Assistant Professor at Florida State University College of Medicine. They are a medical sociologist and program evaluator focused on health equity in aging with chronic disease. Currently they evaluate the Florida Asthma and REACH Geriatrics programs. They have published in numerous journals, including the Sociology of Health & Illness, Symbolic Interaction, and Teaching Sociology plus interdisciplinary sociomedical journals. They have served on editorial boards for Inquiry, The Qualitative Report, and Sociological Spectrum. Their books include the edited volume Negotiating the Emotional Challenges of Deeply Personal Research in Health (Routledge 2017) and the social fiction novel Other People’s Oysters (Brill 2018). They also edit the Health and Aging in the Margins series (Rowman & Littlefield) and the Write Where It Hurts trauma informed scholarship project. Dr. Nowakowski is agender, which informs their intersectional scholarship on chronic illness, and uses they/them pronouns.
Kristina Orfali is Professor of Bioethics and a Fellow of the Institute for Social and Economic Research & Policy at Columbia University. She is a sociologist with broad cross-cultural experience in the study of the practice of bioethics and clinical ethics. She has published work on clinician and family decision making and on neonatal ethics; she is the co-editor of special issues of Sociology of Health & Illness (2007), Social Science & Medicine (2013) and of several books: Who is my Genetic Parent? Assisted Reproduction and Donor Anonymity: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (2012), Families and End of Life Treatment. An International Perspective (2013), The Female Body: A Journey through Law, Culture and Medicine (2014), Reproductive Technology and Changing Perceptions of Parenthood around the World (2014), Protecting the Human Body: Legal and Bioethical Perspectives around the World (2016), and The Reality of Human Dignity in Bioethics and Law: Comparative Perspectives (2018).
Bernice Pescosolido is Distinguished and Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology at Indiana University, Founding Director of the Indiana Consortium for Mental Health Services Research (ICMHSR) and was Founding Co-Director of the Indiana University Network Science Institute (IUNI). Her research focuses on four areas – stigma, health care use, suicide, and social networks – primarily looking at mental illness and substance abuse and the role that social and organizational networks play in people’s responses to problems. Trained as a medical sociologist at Yale University, her research has been published in sociology, anthropology, public health, and psychiatric journals and has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Fogarty International Center, the National Institute of Drug Abuse, the MacArthur Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, among others. She has served as the Vice President of the American Sociological Association, and has received several career, teaching, and mentoring awards in sociology and public health, including the NARSAD Distinguished Investigator Award and the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal from Yale. In 2016, she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.
Stella R. Quah is Adjunct Professor, Health Services and Systems Research, Duke-NUS Medical School, National University of Singapore. Prior to joining Duke-NUS in July 2009, she was Professor of Sociology at the National University of Singapore