Boston-Area Medical Sociologists (BAMS) brings together social scientists, epidemiologists, medical scholars and other faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students who study health, broadly defined. The group began in Fall 2019 as a forum for bringing together medical sociologists from the greater Boston area to present their research, discuss new articles, and participate in professional development workshops. The group brings together scholars from Boston-area schools including Boston College, Boston University, Brandeis, Brown,  Harvard, Northeastern, Simmons, UMass-Boston, and more. Meetings take place in person at CISS and hybrid. Please sign up for BAMS here, and reach out to Stuti Das (stuti@bu.edu) or  Deborah Carr (carrds@bu.edu) for further information, or to speak at an upcoming event.

Fall 2025 Events

Wednesday October 29, 2025. Noon – 1:30 p.m. We will hold our kick-off ‘meet and greet’ in BU’s Center for Innovation in Social Science (CISS) 5th floor conference room, 704 Commonwealth Ave. (located steps from the BU East B Green Line stop). We will each share our research interests and discuss ideas for future programming, including Works in Progress, practice job talks and conference presentations, professional development workshops, and more. Bring your brown bag lunch and enjoy meeting new colleagues and collaborators!

Wednesday December 10, 2025. 2-4 p.m. Practice Job Talks (Hybrid—CISS and Zoom)

Location: Center for Innovation in Social Science, 704 Commonwealth Avenue (directly across from the MBTA B Line BU East stop) and on Zoom

Hsu Huang (PhD Candidate, Brown Sociology) and Ya-Ching Huang (PhD Candidate, BU Sociology) will present their practice job talks at CISS, with a Zoom option available for remote attendees.

If you plan to attend in person, please RSVP to stuti@bu.edu by December 9. The Zoom link is:

https://bostonu.zoom.us/j/96765262773?pwd=kYIZLJGSMNfdnsylHZZiblRC2Jyfvd.1

Meeting ID: 967 6526 2773

Passcode: 274932

Hsu Huang. The “Contrarian” Science: Making COVID-19 Vaccines in China and Russia

This talk derives from my dissertation project, which asks how China and Russia successfully developed their COVID-19 vaccines in record time and in record number, and why Russia’s highly effective Sputnik V struggled to gain international acceptance compared to its less effective Chinese counterparts. Drawing on fieldwork in both countries in their native languages, I trace the answers to their distinct health and technology strategies—rooted in distinct post-socialist transformations and social and technological contexts right before and within the pandemic: China prioritized drug safety, scaling up traditional technologies, reframing them as undervalued assets, legitimizing them through regulatory harmonization—coordinated by a risk-averse, Leninist developmental state—while Russia prioritized drug efficacy, chasing less-established technologies regardless of regulatory legitimacy—enabled by inter-ministerial “free-for-all” under a fragmented autocracy. These divergent pathways force us to ask not only how good is “good enough” when making new drugs within a global pandemic, but more generally, how stakeholders exploit gaps between objective and subjective valuations of products to advance their goals.Bio: Hsu Huang is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Brown University. He specializes in the comparative study of science and technology, health and medicine, and organizations, with a regional focus on East Asia and Eurasia. His research examines two interconnected themes: how scientists, entrepreneurs, regulators, and policymakers navigate trade-offs between technological design, market entry, and public benefit in response to a crisis; and how individual life-course dynamics both shape and are shaped by organizational and macro-historical change. He holds an MSc from King’s College London and European University at St. Petersburg and was a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s David Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

Ya-Ching Huang. In the Light of Fragility: Meanings, Decisions, and Inequalities in Pediatric Palliative Care. What makes the life of a seriously ill or disabled child worth prolonging or living, and what degrees of suffering or functional limitations are considered too much? Drawing on 16-month-long ethnographic observations of two pediatric palliative care programs (one hospital-based and one community-based) and 27 in-depth interviews with healthcare professionals in the U.S., Ya-Ching’s talk shifts the scholarly focus of palliative and hospice care from older adults to children and extends cultural understandings of childhood into care practices and medical decision-making. The meanings of what constitutes an acceptable life under serious illness are narrated, interpreted, and negotiated through relational processes among parents, healthcare professionals, and sometimes children themselves. These cultural understandings shape care and decisions: some families, valuing the emotional connection through caregiving even when the child cannot talk or eat by mouth, tend to pursue life-prolonging measures, while others, prioritizing the protection of the child from suffering when envisioning a limited future of cognitive and physical functionality, are more likely to adopt comfort-oriented approaches. Decision-making for children is further complicated by children’s varying levels of agency, shaped by biological age, disease pathology, and disease progression. Ideas of childhood and worthy life also intersect with age, social class, race, and ethnicity, influencing institutional resource distribution and producing unequal illness experiences across families, not only in medical settings but also in homes and schools.

Bio: Ya-Ching Huang is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Boston University. Her research lies at the intersections of medical sociology, health and healthcare, economic sociology, culture, and morality. Using qualitative methods, she is interested in understanding how cultural meanings, moral considerations, and economic logics intersect to shape practices and decisions across different social contexts. Her dissertation,  examines cultural meanings of children’s lives, the complex decision-making surrounding their care in cases of serious illness, and the unequal consequences for families across class and race.

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Spring 2023 Events.

Tuesday April 4, 2023. 3:30-5 pm This session will feature researchers who are presenting their work at the mid-April annual meetings of the Population Association of America. If you are interested in presenting your work at this PAA practice session, please contact Deborah Carr (carrds@bu.edu). Audience members are encouraged to provide feedback to the presenters. We will meet via Zoom at this link.  Presentations will include:

  • Leah Abrams (assistant professor of community health, Tufts University). “Job Transitions and Mental health Outcomes among US Adults Aged 55 and Older during the COVID-19 Pandemic.”
  • Robbee Wedow (assistant professor of sociology, Purdue University).  “Patterns of Item Nonresponse Behavior to Survey Questionnaires are Systematic and Have a Genetic Basis.” 
  • Deborah Carr (professor of sociology, Boston University), Leping Wang (graduate student, sociology, Boston University), and Pamela Smock (professor of sociology, University of Michigan.” Gender Differences in the Economic Consequences of Life-Long Singlehood among Older White U.S. Adults.”

Tuesday February 28, 2023. 4-5:30 p.m. We will hold a discussion on the topic “Choosing a Peer-Review Journal for your Research.” Panelists Deborah Carr (BU), Joseph Harris (BU) and Sara Shostak (Brandeis) will provide a brief overview of strategies for identifying potential homes for your research. We will then open the floor for discussion, when attendees can provide an overview of their latest paper, and brainstorm together about finding an appropriate target journal, and framing the paper so that it is appealing to the target journal’s editor, reviewers, and readers. We will meet via Zoom at this link.

More events… to be announced.

Fall 2022 Events.

Thursday December 15, 2022. 3-4:30 p.m. This session will feature two works-in-progress focused on sensory impairments and disability in later life. Alyssa Goldman (assistant professor of sociology, Boston College) will discuss “Sensory Health and Functional Limitations among Older Adults in the United States: A Neighborhood Context Approach.” Shinae Choi (former visiting scholar, Center for Innovation in Social Science, Boston University and associate professor of consumer science, University of Alabama) and Deborah Carr (CISS director, and professor of sociology, Boston University) will discuss “Disability and Health Care Services Use Among Older Americans During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Is Telehealth a Substitute or Supplement to Traditional Care?” The event will take place at this Zoom link.

Spring 2022 Events

Thursday February 24, 2022. 5-6:30 p.m. Alyssa Goldman (assistant professor of sociology at Boston College) and Nell Compernolle (research scientist at NORC at the University of Chicago) will present their latest work “Social Network Size, Real-Time Loneliness, and Gender: Buffer or Risk Factor, and for Whom?” This project uses a new dataset that collected ecological momentary assessments from older adults living in Chicago using smartphones over the course of three one-week periods, and enables an exploration of social networks and “real-time” loneliness. Click here for the Zoom link.

Wednesday March 30, 2022. 4-5:30 p.m. Tiffany Joseph (associate professor of sociology and international affairs at Northeastern University) will discuss the introduction to her book manuscript Not All In: Race, Immigration, and Healthcare Exclusion in America’s City on a Hill. She will discuss the theoretical framework of racialized legal status that motivates the book project. The book reveals how intersectional forms of discrimination undermine the effectiveness of policies intended to improve health coverage and access for socially disadvantaged populations. Register here to attend the Zoom session and to receive the chapter draft.

Thursday, April 28, 2022.  4:30-6 p.m. Lacee Satcher (assistant professor of sociology and environmental studies at Boston College) will present on her new project “Are There Regional Differences in Mental Health among Black Americans? An Exploration of Explanatory Mechanisms.” Click here for the Zoom link. 

Fall 2021 Events
Thursday November 18, 2021. 4:30-6 pm. Yue Qin, formerly at Boston College and now a doctoral candidate in sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison,  presented her work “Relationship with Parents and Chinese Adults’ Depression in Mid and Later life.” This is a collaborative project with Professors Sara Moorman (Department of Sociology, Boston College) and Jooyoung Kong (School of Social Work, University of Wisconsin). Click here for Zoom link.

Some of our recent research presentations have included:

  • Leah Abrams (Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow on Aging and Work, Harvard Pop Center). “Job Transitions and Mental Health Outcomes among US adults aged 55 and Older during the COVID-19 Pandemic.”
  • Ailish Burns (doctoral candidate, sociology, Brown University). “A Longitudinal Perspective of Weathering: Race, Age, and Maternal Health.”
  • Xuemei Cao (doctoral candidate, sociology, SUNY Albany). “Seeking Transnational Social Protection during a Global Pandemic: The Case of Chinese Immigrants in the United States.”
  • Neil Gong (assistant professor, sociology, University of California-San Diego). “Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Madness and Inequality in Los Angeles.”
  • Ya-Ching Huang (doctoral candidate, sociology, Boston University) and Alya Guseva (associate professor, sociology, Boston University). “The Moral Economy of Home-Made Masks in the Times of COVID-19.”
  • In Jeong Hwang (doctoral candidate, sociology, Harvard). “Health Consequences of Grandmotherhood in South Korea”
  • Yue Qin (doctoral candidate, sociology, Boston College). “Adult Children’s Intergenerational Mobility and Older Adults’ Mental Health: A US-China Comparison”
  • Kristen Tzoc (doctoral candidate, sociology, Boston University). “Do (Un)met Career Expectations Influence Early Adulthood Depressive symptoms? A Longitudinal Study.”
  • Caoyifu (“CZ”) Zhou (doctoral candidate, sociology Boston University). “Widowhood, Prosocial Behaviors, and Mental Health: Gender and Race Differences.”

Professional development panels have included:

  • Grant Proposal Writing Workshop
  • Publishing in Peer-Reviewed Journals Workshop