Sara Shostak presenting " Exposed Science: Genes, the Environment, and the Politics of Population Health"

Sara Shostak is a Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University. Her research and teaching interests include sociology of health and illness; science and technology studies; the sociology of the body; sociological perspectives on bioethics; environmental health and justice; genetics/genomics; and research methods. Her first book - Exposed Science: Genes, the Environment, and the Politics of Population Health was published by the University of California Press in 2013. Exposed Science analyzes the rise of the study of gene-environment interaction in the environmental health sciences and examines its consequences for how we understand – and seek to protect – population health. Shostak recently completed a collaborative analysis of how people make use of "nature" and "nurture" in their accounts of inequalities across individual level outcomes (e.g., health, intelligence, and success in life). She currently is working on a study that examines change over time in the illness experiences and processes of identity formation among people with epilepsy and their family members (1975 to 2005).