Expertise

Sociology of Medicine, Education, Knowledge, Organizations, Culture, and Inequalities

Biography

As a sociologist, I study the social processes by which institutions shape orientations toward inequalities and how knowledges can be creatively integrated to improve upon these inequalities. More concretely, I study how educators, physicians, and policy makers apply knowledge to improve patient care and how the context in which these actors work impacts how they utilize knowledge. I address questions about how these actors understand the sources of health and healthcare disparities in the U.S. patient population, how they decide what kinds of knowledge are clinically relevant, and how they reproduce forms of inequality in their educational materials and interactional processes.

Curriculum Vitae

Selected Publications

• Olsen, Lauren D. 2024. Curricular Injustice: How U.S. Medical Schools Reproduce Inequalities. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
• Bann, Maralynn, Savannah Larimore, Jessica Wheeler, and Lauren D. Olsen. 2022. “Implementing a Social Determinants of Health Curriculum in Undergraduate Medical Education: A Qualitative Analysis of Faculty Experience.” Academic Medicine 97(11):1665-1672.
• Olsen, Lauren D. and Hana Gebremariam. 2022. “Disciplining Empathy: Differences in Empathy with U.S. Medical Students by College Major.” Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine 26(4):475-494.
• Jenkins, Tania M., Kelly Underman, Alexandra H. Vinson, Lauren D. Olsen, and Laura Hirshfield. 2021. “The Resurgence of Medical Education in Sociology: A Return to Our Roots and an Agenda for the Future.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 62(3):255-270.
• Olsen, Lauren D. 2021. “‘We’d Rather Be Relevant Than Theoretically Accurate’: Translational Medicine and the Transmutation of Cultural Anthropology for Clinical Practice.” Social Problems 68(3):761-777.
• Olsen, Lauren D. 2019. “The Conscripted Curriculum and the Reproduction of Racial Inequalities in Contemporary U.S. Medical Education.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior60(1):55-68.