Boston-Area Medical Sociologists (BAMS)

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 Jaya Mathur (Fulbright-Nehru Visiting PhD Fellow at CISS) at jmathur@bu.edu or  Deborah Carr (carrds@bu.edu) for further information, or to speak at an upcoming event.

Spring 2026 Events 

Please RSVP by 23 February, at jmathur@bu.edu,  so we can plan for the event accordingly. 

Job Market Workshops: Tips for Finding Faculty Positions, Postdocs, and Non-Academic Positions

Monday, March 23, 3.30 – 5.00 PM ET, on Zoom.

Please register here to receive the Zoom link. 

This fully virtual event features a panel of 5 speakers who, as recent PhDs, will share their experiences, insights, and advice on how to strategize while on the job market. Learn more about Drs. Stuti Das, Kristen Tzoc, Rebekah Getman, Meghann Lucy, and Tibrine da Fonseca in their biosketches below. They will discuss topics that include: deciding the types of jobs to apply for, tailoring application materials, preparing for interviews, and what they wish they knew while they were on the job market. The session will be moderated by Professors Deborah Carr and Alisa Lincoln, and will be followed up with a Q&A.

Panelists

Stuti Das is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Texas Medical Branch. She received her PhD in Sociology from Boston University in 2025. Her research focuses on health disparities between foreign- and native-born populations and the social and policy factors that shape these patterns.

Dr. Tibrine da Fonseca is the Project Director for the Boston Community Health Collaborative at the Boston Public Health Commission. She leads efforts to deepen collaboration across health systems, public health, and community partners by aligning community health assessment and improvement planning efforts. She earned her doctorate in Sociology from Northeastern University, where she specialized in immigrant health research exploring how policy and place shape immigrant inclusion and well-being. Her work bridges social science and public health to elevate community leadership and advance health equity in Boston.

Rebekah Getman completed her PhD in Sociology at Northeastern in 2024, where she focused on medical sociology and completed a certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her dissertation studied the experiences and decision-making strategies of childbirth care providers and hospital administrators in Massachusetts during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Just prior to defending her dissertation, she started a position at UMass Chan School of Medicine, where she is the administrative lead on a 6-year study of the impact of community partnerships in OB/GYN settings on perinatal mood and anxiety disorder assessment, treatment, and outcomes.

Meghann Lucy is an assistant professor of sociology at Montana State University and received her PhD in sociology from Boston University in 2024. Her interests are in the intersections of sociology of health and medicine, consumption, and deviance and social control. Her work examines mental illness, stigma, culture, media, and the medicalization—and criminalization—of overaccumulation as hoarding disorder. Recent research explores how deservingness is constructed related to hoarding in housing court, how nonmedical actors identify and manage the consequences of mental illness and deviance in communities, changes in how drug use is discussed in obituaries related to off-time deaths in West Virginia over the course of the opioid crisis, and the meanings of clutter and role of object divestment in constructions of the contemporary self.

Kristen Tzoc graduated from Boston University with a PhD in Sociology in 2024, and  joined the Hood College (Frederick, MD) faculty as an Assistant Professor of Sociology in September 2024.  She teaches courses including Principles of Sociology, Social Inequalities, Childhood and Youth, Global Social Problems, Health, Medicine, and Society, and Methods for Social Science Research.  Her research interests include social inequalities across the life course, aging and retirement, medical sociology, and labor market stratification.

Session Moderators

Deborah Carr is the director of the Center of Innovation in Social Science at Boston University and A&S Distinguished Professor of Sociology. She is a life course sociologist who uses survey data and quantitative methods to study social factors linked with health and well-being in later life. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, RRF Foundation on Aging, Templeton Foundation, Borchard Foundation, and most recently Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America, a member of the honorary Sociological Research Association, and the recipient of the 2022 Matilda White Riley Distinguished Scholar Award and 2023 Outstanding Mentorship Award from the ASA Aging & Life Course section. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2024.

Alisa K. Lincoln, MPH, PhD is an Inter-disciplinary Professor of Sociology and Health Sciences and Director of the Institute for Health Equity and Social Justice Research at Northeastern University.  Her research examines the way that social exclusion and marginalization both contribute to and are consequences of poor mental health. Much of her work has included attention to the development of innovative models to increase community involvement in research. She is currently the Co-PI of the Salus Papuli Project, with funding from RWJF and the WK Kellogg Foundation which supports the development, implementation and evaluation of an innovative Judicial Education Program (JEP) To train judges in the social determinant of health. Her multiple research teams also prioritize the inclusion of students through a shared mentorship approach including undergraduates, master’s level, doctoral level and post-doctoral students. She has over 20 years of continuous research funding from sources including NIMH, NIMHD, SAMHSA, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, WK Kellogg Foundation and NIJ.

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Thursday, January 29, 2026. 1:30–2:45 PM. Works-in-Progress “Lightening Talks” 

At this Zoom session, scholars will present their works-in-progress and receive constructive feedback and thoughtful questions from participants. Register here for Zoom link.

• Sophie Arnold, Sociology PhD Candidate, Boston UniversityCare Networks, Unmet Needs, and Well-Being in Older Adults: Evidence from The National Aging Trends Study (NHATS). My talk will present findings from an analysis of Round 13 of the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS) examining how the size of older adults’ caregiving networks relates to unmet care needs and well-being. Focusing on adults aged 65 and older who report needing help with at least one ADL or IADL, I will describe the prevalence and composition of caregiving networks, ranging from no caregivers to large, multi-person networks that include both informal and formal supports. Using negative binomial and logistic regression models, I will show that larger caregiver networks are associated with higher reported unmet need—a pattern that complicates common assumptions that more care might not necessarily mean better care.
• Jaya Mathur, Visiting Scholar, CISS, Boston University“We will only know once we do it”: Interventional Pain Medicine and Ambiguity as Resource in the Management of Suffering and Uncertainty in IndiaHealthcare professionals frequently navigate uncertainty as a significant feature of clinical medicine. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a specialised pain clinic in North India, I argue that pain physicians offering interventional modes of pain management use ambiguity as an interactional resource to execute their expertise while navigating uncertain treatment outcomes. It allows physicians to encourage the uptake of analgesic care, manage patient expectations of pain relief, and retain the credibility of their clinical and scientific expertise.
• Jane Pryma, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Boston University

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!

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