The Section on Medical Sociology’s Donald W. Light Award for Applied or Public Practice of Medical Sociology
2024: Lori Freedman, University of California, San Francisco, Bishops and Bodies: Reproductive Care in American Catholic Hospitals. Rutgers University Press. 2023.
2024: Alexandra Brewer, University of Southern California, “Painful Feelings: Opioids as Tools for Avoiding Emotional Labor in Hospital Work.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 64(3):386–400. 2023.
2024: Mira D. Vale, University of Michigan, and Denise White Perkins, Henry Ford Health System, “Discuss and Remember: Clinician Strategies for Integrating Social Determinants of Health in Patient Records and Care.” Social Science & Medicine, Vol. 315,2022.
2024 Honorable Mention: Victor Roy, Yale University, Capitalizing a Cure: How Finance Controls the Price and Value of Medicines. University of California Press. 2023.
2023: Krystale Littlejohn, University of Oregon. Just Get On the Pill. University of California Press.
2023: Taylor M. Cruz, California State University, Fullerton, and Emily Allen Paine, Columbia University, “Capturing Patients, Missing Inequities: Data Standardization on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Across Unequal Clinical Contexts.” Social Science & Medicine, 285, 114295. 2021.
2023 Honorable Mention: stef shuster, Michigan State University, Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender. New York University Press. 2021.
2023 Honorable Mention: Mike Vuolo, Laura C. Frizzell, Ohio State University, and Brian C. Kelly, Purdue University, “Surveillance, Self-Governance, and Mortality: The Impact of Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs on US Overdose Mortality, 2000–2016. “Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 63(3), 337-356. 2022.
2022: Jill Fisher, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals, NYU Press. 2020.
2022: Katharine McCabe, Bucknell University, “Criminalization of Care: Drug Testing Pregnant Patients.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 63(2), 162-176. 2022.
2022 Honorable Mention: Tania M. Jenkins, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Doctors’ Orders: The Making of Status Hierarchies in an Elite Profession, Columbia University Press. 2020.
2021: stef shuster, Michigan State University, “Performing Informed Consent in Transgender Medicine.” Social Science & Medicine 226: 190-197. 2019.
2020: Michelle Newhart, University of LaVerne, and William Dolphin, University of Redlands, The Medicalization of Marijuana: Legitimacy, Stigma, and the Patient Experience. Routledge.
2019: Brian C. Kelly, Mike Vuolo, Laura C. Frizzell, and Elaine M. Hernandez, “Denormalization, Smoke-free Air Policy, and Tobacco Use among Young Adults”
2018: Jennifer Reich, University of Colorado, Denver, Calling the Shots: Why Parents Reject Vaccines. New York University Press. 2016.
2017: Helen Marrow and Tiffany Joseph, “Excluded and Frozen Out: Unauthorised Immigrants’ (Non)Access to Care after US Health Care Reform,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 41(14):2253-2273. 2015.
2016: Georgiann Davis, Contesting Intersex: The Dubious Diagnosis. New York University Press. 2015.
The Section on Medical Sociology’s Eliot Freidson Outstanding Publication Award
The Eliot Friedson Award was established in 1993. The award alternates between a book and an article.
2024: Alex Barnard, New York University, Conservatorship: Inside California’s System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness. Columbia University Press. 2023.
2024 Honorable Mention: Jenny Trinitapoli, University of Chicago, An Epidemic of Uncertainty: Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi” Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2023.
2023: Sanyu A. Mojola, Nicole Angotti, Enid Schatz, and Brian Houle, “’A Nowadays Disease’: HIV/AIDS and Social Change in a Rural South African Community.”
2023 Honorable Mention: Michaela DeSoucey, North Carolina State University, and Miranda Waggoner, Rice University, “Another Person’s Peril: Peanut Allergy, Risk Perceptions, and Responsible Sociality.”
2022: Armando Lara-Millan, University of California, Berkeley, Redistributing the Poor: Jails, Hospitals, and the Crisis of Law and Fiscal Austerity, Oxford University Press. 2021.
2022 Honorable Mention: Danielle T. Raudenbush, University of California, San Diego, Health Care Off the Books: Poverty, Illness, and Strategies for Survival in Urban America, University of California Press. 2020.
2021: Kevin Estep and Pierce Greenberg. 2020. “Opting Out: Individualism and Vaccine Refusal in Pockets of Socioeconomic Homogeneity.” American Sociological Review 85(6); 957-991. 2020
2021 Honorable Mention: Alexandra Brewer, Melissa Osborne, Anna S. Mueller, Daniel M. O’Connor, Arjun Dayal, and Vineet M. Arora. 2020. “Who Gets the Benefit of the Doubt? Performance Evaluations, Medical Errors, and the Production of Gender Inequality in Emergency Medical Education.” American Sociological Review 85(2): 247-270. 2020
2020: Celeste Watkins-Hayes, Northwestern University, Remaking a Life: How Women Living with HIV/AIDS Confront Inequality. California.
2020 Honorable Mention: Owen Whooley, University of New Mexico, On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing. Chicago.
2019: Laura Stark, “Contracting Health: Procurement Contracts, Total Institutions, and the Problem of Virtuous Suffering in Postwar Human Experiment”
2019 Honorable Mention: Hui Zheng and Linda George, “Does Medical Expansion Improve Population Health?”
2018: Terence McDonnell, University of Notre Dame, Best Laid Plans: Cultural Entropy and the Unraveling of AIDS Media Campaigns. University of Chicago. 2016.
2017: Brea Perry, “Gendering Genetics: Biological Contingencies in the Protective Effects of Social Integration for Men and Women,” American Journal of Sociology 121(6):1655-1696. 2016.
2017 Honorable Mention: C. Reczek, R. Spiker, H. Liu, and R. Crosnoe, “Family Structure and Child Health: Does the Sex Composition of Parents Matter?” Demography 53(5):1605-1630. 2016.
2016: Joanna Kempner, Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health. University of Chicago Press. 2014.
2015: Seth Abrutyn and Anna Mueller, “Are Suicidal Behaviors Contagious in Adolescence? Using Longitudinal Data to Examine Suicide Suggestion,” American Sociological Review 79(2):211–227. 2014.
2014: Sara Shostak, Brandeis University, Exposed Science: Genes, the Environment, and the Politics of Population Health. University of California Press. 2013.
2013: Rachel Kahn Best, University of Michigan
2012: Howard Waitzkin, University of New Mexico, Medicine and Public Health at the End of Empire. Paradigm Publishers. 2011.
2011: Ka Liu, Marissa King and Peter Bearman, Columbia University, “Social Influence and the Autism Epidemic,” American Journal of Sociology 115(5):1389-1434. 2010.
2010: Kelly A. Joyce, College of William and Mary, Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency. Cornell University Press. 2008.
2009: Bernice A. Pescosolido, Brea L. Perry, J. Scott Long, Jack K. Martin, John I. Nurnberger and Victor Hesselbrock, Indiana University, “Under the Influence of Genetics: How Transdisciplinarity Leads Us to Rethink Social Pathways to Illness,” American Journal of Sociology 114(1):171-201. 2008.
2008: Steven Epstein, University of California, San Diego, Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2007.
2007: Elizabeth Armstrong, Princeton University, Daniel P. Carpenter, Harvard University, and Marie Hojnacki, Pennsylvania State University, “Whose Deaths Matter?:Mortality, Advocacy, and Attention to Disease in the Mass Media,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law 31(4):729-772. 2006.
2006: Stefan Timmermans, Brandeis University, Postmortem: How Medical Examiners Explain Suspicious Deaths. University of Chicago Press. 2006.
2005: Jason Beckfield, “Does Income Inequality Harm Health?” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 45(3):231-248. 2004.
2005: Jill Quadagno, “Why the United States has No National Health Insurance,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 45(Extra Issue):25-44. 2004.
2004: Samuel W. Bloom, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, The Word as Scalpel: A History of Medical Sociology. Oxford University Press. 2002.
2003: David Cohen, Michael McCubbin, Johanne Collin, Guilheme Perodeau, University of Montreal, “Medications as Social Phenomena,” Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness, and Medicine, Vol. 5, Issue 4, pp. 441-469. 2001.
2001: David Rier, Bar-Ilan University, “The Missing Voice of the Critically Ill: Medical Scociologist’s First-Person Account”
2000: Carol Heimner and Lisa R. Staffen, Northwestern University, For the Sake of Children: The Social Organization of Responsibility in the Hospital and the Home. University of Chicago Press. 1998.
1999: Stephanie A. Robert, University of Wisconsin, Madison, “Community–Level Socio-Economic Status Effects on Adult Health”
1998: Daniel F. Chambliss, Hamilton College, Beyond Caring: Hospitals, Nurses and the Social Organization of Ethics. University of Chicago Press. 1996.
1997: Ann Barry Flood, Dartmouth Unversity, and Mary Fennell, Brown University, “Deciding Who Lives: Fateful Choices in the Intensive Care Nursery through the Lenses of Organizational Theory and Research in Conceptualizing and Examining our Health Care System”
1996: Renee Anspach, University of Michigan
1995: Catherine E. Ross and Chloe E. Bird, The Ohio State University Health Institute, “Sex Stratification and Health: Lifestyle Consequences for Men’s and Women’s Perceived Health,” Journal of Health and Social Behvaior 35(2):161-178. 1994.
1994: Gary L. Albrecht, University of Illinois, Chicago, The Disability Business: Rehabilitation in America. Sage Publications, Inc. 1992.
1993: Constance A. Nathanson, Johns Hopkins University, “Dangerous Passage: The Social Control of Sexuality in Women’s Adolescence,” American Journal of Sociology 98(2):444-445. 1992.
1993: Robert Zussman, State University of New York, Stony Brook, Intensive Care: Medical Ethics and the Medical Profession. University of Chicago Press. 1992.
The Section on Medical Sociology’s Howard B. Kaplan Memorial Award
2024: Caroline V. Brooks, Indiana University Bloomington
2023: Lawrence Stacey, Vanderbilt University
2023 Honorable Mention: Wayne Rivera-Cuadrado, Northwestern University
2022: Nik M. Lampe, University of South Carolina
2021: Erin McCauley, Cornell University
2020: Nicholas C. Smith, Indiana University
2019: Mark Pawson
2018: Wallis Adams, Northeastern University
2017: Suzan Walters
2016: Bianca Manago, University of Indiana, Bloomington
2015: William McConnell, Indiana University, Bloomington
2014: Allison Houston, State University of New York, Albany
2013: Alexander Lu, Indiana University
The Section on Medical Sociology’s Leo G. Reeder Award
In 1977 the Section on Medical Sociology established an award for distinguished service to the field. The award was renamed the Leo G. Reeder Award following the death of Reeder, Chair of the Section, in 1978. Leo G. Reeder was onboard Pacific Southwest Airlines flight 182 when it collided with another plane over San Diego on September 25, 1978; there were no survivors.
2024: Pamela Braboy Jackson, Indiana University Bloomington
2023: Troy Duster, University of California, Berkeley
2022: Susan Bell, Drexel University
2021: No award made
2020: Debra Umberson
2019: Stefan Timmermans
2018: Paul Cleary, Yale University
2017: Kathy Charmaz
2016: Allan V. Horwitz, Rutgers
2015: Adele Clarke, University of California, San Francisco
2014: Catherine Ross, University of Texas, Austin
2014: John Mirowsky, University of Texas, Austin
2013: Charles L. Bosk, University of Pennsylvania
2012: Phil Brown, Brown University
2011: David Williams, Harvard University
2010: Peggy A. Thotis, Indiana University
2009: Jill Quadagno, Florida State University
2008: Carol Aneschensel, University of California, Los Angeles
2007: Bruce Link, Columbia University
2006: Howard B. Kaplan, Texas A&M University
2005: Bernice Pescosolido, Indiana University
2004: Peter Conrad, Brandeis University
2003: Walter R. Gove, Vanderbilt University
2002: R. Jay Turner, Florida State University
2001: James House, Institute for Survey Research, University of Michigan
2000: Mary E.W. Goss, Weill, Medical College of Cornell University
1999: Bruce Dohrenwend, Columbia University
1998: Robert Straus, University of Kentucky
1997: Howard Waitzkin, University of New Mexico
1996: Rodney M. Coe, Saint Louis University, School of Medicine
1995: John B. McKinlay, New England Research Institute
1994: Ronald M. Andersen, University of California, Los Angeles
1993: Marie R. Haug, Case Western Reserve University
1992: Marshall Becker, University of Michigan
1991: Leonard Pearlin, University of California, San Francisco
1990: Irving Zola, Brandeis University
1989: Samuel W. Bloom, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, and the City University of New York
1988: Virginia Olesen, University of California, San Francisco
1987: John Clausen, University of California, Berkeley
1986: Sol Levine, Boston University
1985: Jack Elinson, Columbia University School of Public Health
1984: Renee Fox, University of Pennsylvania
1983: David Mechanic, University of Wisconsin
1982: Eliot Freidson, New York University
1981: Anselm Strauss, University of California, San Francisco
1980: Odin Anderson, University of Chicago
1979: Margot Jefferys, Bedford College, University of London
1978: Everett Hughes, University of Chicago
1977: August B. Hollingshead, Yale University
The Section on Medical Sociology’s Roberta G. Simmons Outstanding Dissertation Award
This award was named the Best Dissertation Award until 1993, then it became the Roberta G. Simmons Outstanding Dissertation Award.
2024: Philip Pettis, Michigan State University, “Contextualizing Heterosexism: An Intersectional Approach to Sexual Minority Health Inequalities.”
2024 Honorable Mention: Nicholas C. Smith, University of Maryland, “Residential Segregation and Black-White Differences in Physical and Mental Health: Evidence of a Health Paradox?” Social Science & Medicine, 340, p.116417. 2023.
2023: Mia Brantley, North Carolina State University
2023 Honorable Mention: Alexis Dennis, McGill University
2022: Andréa Becker, City University of New York, Graduate Center, “Same Uterus, Different Paths: Hysterectomy Narratives and the Stratified Motherhood Complex in Reproductive Medicine”
2022 Honorable Mention: Alexandra Brewer, University of Chicago, “Convenient Disasters: Exogenous Shocks and Ambivalence Toward Professional Standards for the Management of Pain with Opioids”
2021: Sarah Brothers, “A Good “Doctor” Is Hard to Find: Assessing Uncredentialed Expertise in Assisted Injection” Based on her larger dissertation entitled: Hit Doctors at Work: Gender, Marginality and the Practice of Expertise among People who Inject Drugs.
2020: Lauren Olsen, Temple University, “The Conscripted Curriculum and the Reproduction of Racial Inequalities in Contemporary U.S. Medical Education.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 60(1): 55-68. Based on her full dissertation Constructing Relevance and Reproducing Inequality: The Integration of the Humanities and Social Sciences into Contemporary U.S. Medical Education.
2019: Patricia A. Homan, “Structural Sexism and Health in the United States”
2019 Honorable Mention: Josh Seim, “Working on the Poor: Ambulance Labor in the Polarized City”
2018: Lindsay M. Stevens, Rutgers University, “According to Plan?: Medicine, Culture, and Reproductive Planning in the United States”
2018 Honorable Mention: Matthew Grace, Hamilton College, “Fractures in the Medical Education Pipeline: The Social Determinants of Program Attrition among Early Career Premedical Students”
2017: Tania Jenkins, “Solitary versus Supported Autonomy: How Stratification in Medical Education Shapes Approaches to Patient Care”
2016: Kelly Underman, “Playing doctor: Simulation in medical school as affective practice,” Social Science & Medicine 136-137:180-181. 2015.
2015: Jamie Chang, “Health in the Tenderloin: A Resident-Guided Study of Substance Use, Treatment, and Housing,” Social Science & Medicine 176:166-174. 2017.
2014: Trevor Hoppe, University of Michigan
2013: Garbarski, University of Wisconsin, Madison, “Cumulative Disadvantage in the Relationship of Child Health with Maternal Health and Family Socioeconomic Factors”
2012: Elaine Hernandez, The University of Texas, Austin, “The Unintended Consequences of Medical Advances: Educational Differences in H1N1 Influenza Vaccination During Pregnancy”
2011: Nancy C. Davenport, Columbia University, “Medical Residents’ Use of Narrative Templates in Storytelling and Diagnosis,” Social Science & Medicine 73(6):873-881. 2011.
2010: Kerry Dobransky, Northwestern University, James Madison University, “Help Me Help You: The Logic and Practice of Empowerment in Community Mental Health Services”
2009: Marissa D. King, Columbia University, “The Evolution of a Socioeconomic Gradient for Autism”
2008: Rene Almeling, University of California, Los Angeles, “Selling Genes, Selling Gender: Egg Agencies, Sperm Banks, and the Medical Market in Genetic Material,” American Sociological Review 72(3):319-340. 2007.
2007: Kristen Springer, University of Wisconsin, “His and Her Marriage Today: The Impact of Wives’ Employment on Husbands’ Later Mid-Life Health”
2006: Joanna Kempner, University of Michigan, Not Tonight: The Politics of Gender and Legitimacy in Heachache Medicine. University of Chicago Press. 2014.
2005: Rebecca Utz, University of Utah, “Obesity in America 1960-2000: An Age-Period-Cohort Analysis”
2004: Jennifer Fishman, University of California, San Francisco and Case Western Reserve, “Manufacturing Desire: The Commodification of Female Sexual Dysfunction,” Social Studies of Science 34(2):187-218. 2004.
2001: Karen Luftey, University of Minnesota, “Practitioner Assessments of Patient Compliance with Medical Treatment Regimens: An Ethnographic Study of Two Diabetes Clinics”
2000: Elizabeth R. Armstrong, University of Michigan, “Diagnosing Moral Disorder: The Discovery and Evolution of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome,” Social Science & Medicine 47(12):2025-2042. 1998.
1999: Anne E. Barrett, Duke University, “Marital Trajectories and Mental Health: A Typological Approach to the Social Causation Hypothesis”
1998: Stephanie A. Robert, University of California, Berkeley, “Community-level Socioeconomic Status Effects on Adult Health,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 39(1):18-37. 1998.
1997: Timothy J. Hoff, State University of New York, Albany, “Conflicting Identities among Physician-Managers in a Changing HMO”
1996: Monica J. Casper, University of California-Santa Cruz, “Working on and Around Human Fetuses: The Contested Domain of Fetal Surgery, 1963-1993”
1995: Eric R. Wright, Indiana University, “Caring for Those Who Can’t: Gender Network Structure, and the Burden of Caring For People with Mental Illness”
1994: Donald Barr, Stanford University, “Medical Work in Estonia: The Intersection of Professional and Bureaucratic Systems for Authority in Determining Professional Status and Rewards”
1993: Robin W. Simon, Indiana University, “Spouse, Parent, and Worker: Gender, Multiple Roles, Role Meaning and Mental Health”
1992: Shirley A. Hill, University of Kansas, “Mothers of Children with Sickle Cell Disease: The Management of Chronic Illness in Low-income African American Families”
1991: Karen A. Lyman, Chaffey College, “Stress in the Work of Dementia Care: A Comparison of Eight Alzheimer’s Day Care Centers”
1990: Charles W. Hunt, University of Utah
1989: Thomas A. LaVeist, University of Michigan, “The Political Power and Health Status of Urban Blacks: Mapping a New Territory”
1988: Joan Fujimara, Harvard University
1987: Debra Umberson, University of Michigan, “Parenthood & Social Integration: Implications for Psychological Well-Being and Risk-Taking Behaviors”
1986: Adele Clark, University of California-San Francisco, “Emergence of the Reproductive Research Enterprise: A Sociology of Biological, Medical, and Agricultural Science in the U.S., 1910-1940”
1985: Catherine Taylor, McGill University, “Good Death as Medical Success”
1983: Renee Anspach, University of California-San Diego
1981: Robert Hernandez, University of North Carolina, “A Conservative Model of Selected Social-Psychological Processes Affecting Work Groups in Health Services Organizations”
