Faculty and Staff

Dan Dohan is Professor of Health Policy, Surgery, and Humanities and Social Sciences at the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. He received his PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley. His publications address medical sociology, health policy, culture and inequality, and ethnographic research methods. He has written one book, The Price of Poverty: Money, Work, and Culture in the Mexican-American Barrio (UC Press 2003).

Sarah B. Garrett, PhD, is a medical and cultural sociologist. She works to promote health equity via stakeholder-informed mixed-methods research, focusing in particular on maternal health. She is core faculty at the Phillip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies (IHPS) at UCSF.

Research Interests: The social construction and experience of addiction; Co-morbidity (HIV, substance abuse, mental illness), homelessness, and US urban health; Chronic non-cancer pain, clinical uncertainty, and scientific evidence; Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), bi-polar disorder, and the US welfare state; Gender, reproduction, motherhood and citizenship.

Dorothy Dolan's (nee Porter) research interests are in the history of public health, social medicine and the formation of the nation state since the eighteenth century. She has also published on the history of the experience of health and illness by patients and healers in the context of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

Laurel Waycott studies the shared histories of science, medicine, and art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her current project, The Pattern Seekers, is a history of the concept of pattern recognition. Originating in the world of craft and design, the notion of “pattern” was widely adopted by scientists at the beginning of the twentieth century. By examining the history of design alongside the history of science, this project demonstrates how culturally specific notions of beauty shaped the construction of knowledge in the life and human sciences.

Dr. Paul D. Blanc MD MSPH is Professor of Medicine and holds the Endowed Chair in Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the University of California San Francisco, where he has been on faculty since 1988. He received his BA from Goddard College (Plainfield, Vermont), where he first became interested in health and the environment, later training at the Harvard School of Public Health (in industrial hygiene), the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, and Cook County Hospital (in a joint Occupational Medicine and Internal Medicine Residency).

I am interested in philosophical and ethnographic issues regarding how bodies, media, viruses and bacteria, narratives and songs, and race constantly get mixed up, sometimes fatally. I have engage these issues by investigating epidemics of cholera and rabies in Venezuela, struggling with relatives, doctors, nurses, healers, and epidemiologists to figure out why so many people die from preventable diseases. My concern with infectiousness spreads from microbes to narratives, to thinking about who produces the stories of H1N1, Ebola, diabetes, etc.

Dr. Silvia Camporesi is a bioethicist with an interdisciplinary background in biotechnology, ethics, and the philosophy of medicine. She holds two PhDs: the first in Foundations of Life Sciences and Ethics, a joint program of the European School of Molecular Medicine and the University of Milan (2010); the second in Philosophy of Medicine awarded by King's College, London (2013), funded by the Wellcome Trust Centre for Humanities & Health.

Lawrence Cohen's primary field is the critical study of medicine, health, and the body. His book No Aging in India is about Alzheimer's disease, the body and the voice in time, and the cultural politics of senility. His two current projects are India Tonite, which examines homoerotic identification and representation in the context of political and market logics in urban north India, and The Other Kidney about the nature of immunosuppression and its accompanying global traffic in organs for transplant.

Dr. Dzeng is a sociologist and hospitalist physician conducting research at the nexus of sociology, medical ethics, palliative care, health equity, anti-racism, and human-centered design. She is an Associate Professor "In Residence" at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in the Division of Hospital Medicine and Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sociology program, Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies.

Jim V. Gatewood, PhD, MSN, AGPCNP-BC, RN is an assistant clinical professor in the Community Health Systems Department in the School of Nursing at UCSF. He began his professional career as a professor of twentieth-century U.S. intellectual, cultural, immigration and Asian American history. He was the interim head of the urban community and environmental studies concentration in the B.A. program in Liberal Studies at Antioch University Los Angeles before entering the MEPN program at UCSF.

Seth M. Holmes is the Chancellor's Professor of Society and Environment (Department of Environmental Science, Policy, Management) and Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley. He is Co-Director (with Ian Whitmarsh) of the MD/PhD Track in Medical Anthropology coordinated between UCSF and UC Berkeley and Co-Chair (with Charles Briggs) of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine. Holmes is currently investigating social hierarchies, health, health care and the naturalization and normalization of difference and inequality in the context of transnational US-Mexico im/migration.

Julene K Johnson, PhD is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the UCSF Institute for Health & Aging. She is co-director of the Sound Health Network, which is a partnership between UCSF and the NEA, in collaboration with the NIH, Kennedy Center, and Renee Fleming. She also leads a new NIH/NIA U24 "Music & Dementia Research Network. She is a long-standing faculty mentor in the UCSF Center for Aging in Diverse Communities (a NIA-funded Resource Center for Minority Aging Research). Dr.

Stefania Pandolfo studies theories and forms of subjectivity, and their contemporary predicaments in the Middle Eastern and Muslim world, investigating narrative, trauma, psychoanalysis and the unconscious, memory, historicity and the hermeneutics of disjuncture, language and poetics, experimental ethnographic writing, anthropology and literature, dreaming and the anthropological study of the imagination, intercultural approaches to different ontologies and systems of knowledge, modernity, colonialism and postcolonialism, madness and mental illness.

Medical anthropologist and public health nurse practitioner in San Francisco. Her areas of expertise include medical anthropology, STS, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, postsocialism, social medicine, and critical public health. She has conducted ethnographic research examining (post)socialist technoscientific formations through Cuban cancer vaccines. Her new research examines a novel program providing thousands of rooms in tourist hotels to persons experiencing homelessness during the COVID19 pandemic.

At the University of California, San Francisco, Karen A. Scott, MD, MPH, FACOG is an Associate Professor and OBGYN Hospitalist in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. As a sexual, reproductive, and perinatal (SRP) epidemiologist and obstetric hospitalist, the ethics and science of her research, clinical practice, and teaching exists at the intersections of critical, interpretative, cultural, and biomedical anthropology and crunk public health, with a foundation rooted in Cultural Rigor, Black Feminism, and Reproductive Justice (RJ).

Areas of Interest: Sociology of health and illness; social inequalities in health; science, technology, and medicine studies; race, gender, and class; qualitative research methods.

Medical Anthropologist. Areas of research and publication include: Family Planning; Afghan Refugees; LGBTQ Families; Sperm, Egg and Kidney Donation/Sale; Reproductive Technologies and Bioethics; Cross-border Fertility Travel; Sexuality and Gender; Critical Medical Anthropology; Reproductive Health Policy; Mixed Methods Research; Documentary Film; Iran, Middle East, Spain, US.