Past Events
Stories That Travel: An Introduction to the Health Experiences Research Network
MCL GRAND ROUNDS - Stories That Travel: An Introduction to the Health Experiences Research Network
Precision medicine has led to significant scientific advances, yet access remains highly uneven. The benefits are often influenced more by a patient's personal factors, insurance coverage, and treatment location than by medical need.
How can we reduce these barriers and improve access for patients who stand to gain the most from these innovations?
The Health Experiences Research Network (HERN) considers patient and family experiences as primary evidence.
HERN collects narratives using a rigorous qualitative approach and shares findings not only through traditional academic channels but also by making these stories accessible to patients, families, clinicians-in-training, researchers, and policymakers. Additionally, HERN facilitates international comparisons of how these experiences differ.
In this talk, Dr. Mrig will introduce HERN and the HEXI methodology through two examples from her precision medicine research: a co-led primary study with patients and families affected by undiagnosed diseases, and her recent work examining how individuals at risk for hereditary conditions access genetic testing and follow-up care. She'll conclude by discussing next steps in this research and potential opportunities for future MCL/UCSF collaborations.
Emily Mrig
Emily Hammad Mrig, PhD, MA, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy and the Center for Translational and Policy Research on Precision Medicine (TRANSPERS) at UCSF.
An interdisciplinary social scientist trained in health and behavioral science (PhD), anthropology (MA), and health policy (postdoc at Yale), she examines how insurance, institutional structures, and policy shape access to precision medicine across a range of health contexts, including cancer, rare and undiagnosed diseases, and neurodegenerative and Alzheimer’s diseases. She is a mixed-methods researcher whose approaches integrate qualitative narrative methods with health services research to bring patient and family experiences into policy conversations. She is an active member of the U.S. Health Experiences Research Network (HERN) and the international DIPEx/HEXI consortium.
Challenging Allergies: The Search for a Magic Bullet for Pediatric Food Allergies
MCL GRAND ROUNDS - Challenging Allergies: The Search for a Magic Bullet for Pediatric Food Allergies
Food allergies have been on the rise over the past twenty years, and they have become an important area of medical research and pharmaceutical development. In this talk, Dr. Fisher will discuss her new book project that focuses on how families pursue a form of “medicalized normalcy” for their children as they seek medical interventions to treat food allergies. The project is based on what began as an ethnographic study of food allergy clinical trials and expanded to include semi-structured interviews with practicing allergists and families who had never pursued a clinical trial for their children. The talk will focus on how clinical trials and other food allergy treatments are a form of biomedicalization that exposes children to exceptional, and sometimes traumatic, interventions that parents justify through the elusive “normal" life and future they envision for them.
Jill Fisher
Jill A. Fisher, Ph.D., is Professor of Social Medicine and core faculty in the UNC Center for Bioethics. Dr. Fisher is a social scientist with a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and expertise in medical sociology and research ethics. Her scholarship and teaching interests center upon how social inequalities are produced or exploited by commercialized medicine in the United States. Dr. Fisher has published three books and over 50 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She is the recipient of over $5 million in funding as principal investigator or co-principal investigator on grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Why Was the U.S. COVID-19 Pandemic a Health Communication Disaster and What Can It Teach Us about Health / Communicative Justice?
Provider-patient interaction guidelines are designed to render clinical encounters communicable, to maximize the exchange of clear and useful knowledge. Building on Frantz Fanon and Black feminist writers, this talk explores how attempts to impose communicability can produce incommunicability, portraying patients— particularly from Black, Latinx, and Native American populations—as unable to effectively grasp providers’ words or translate them into recommended behaviors. It centers on how COVID-19 clinical and public health communication relied on a unilinear, hierarchically ordered model that clashed with a widespread patientcentered, individualistic version, engendering resistance from conservative whites.
Reflections on interdisciplinary interventions and biosocial medical anthropology
MCL GRAND ROUNDS - Sahra Gibbon, Professor of Medical Anthropology, International Studies, and Internal Medicine at University College London. Dr. Sahra Gibbon is a medical anthropologist whose work examines the interface between science, society and biomedicine.
Is Medicine Actually Secular? Palliative Care in Thailand and the US and their Entangled Physics and Metaphysics
MCL GRAND ROUNDS - Scott Stonington, Associate Professor, Anthropology, International Studies, and Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan. Scott Stonington is a medical and cultural anthropologist, and an internal medicine physician. His research primarily addresses the globalization of bioethics.
Aging in Place Finds Meaning Through the Quotidian: Surviving in the Most Livable Large City in America
Jarmin Yeh, PhD, MPH, MSSW, is an Associate Professor in the Institute for Health & Aging, Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences, in the School of Nursing at UCSF. Their research broadly investigates social justice issues that impact the quality of life of community-dwelling older adults.
What is antiracism, and why does it matter for (neuro)science?
Oliver Rollins is an Assistant Professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington. He uses qualitative research methods to explore how practices of race, racism, and other systemic inequities impact the making and use of neuroscientific technologies and knowledges.