Steven Epstein (Sociology)
Science Studies Program Director sepstein@ucsd.edu

Prof. Epstein is on leave in 2008-09.
Prof. Robert Westman is serving as
Interim Program Director and may be contacted at rwestman@ucsd.edu.

University of California, San Diego
Department of Sociology, 0533
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093-0533
Phone: (858) 534-0489
Fax: (858) 534-4753

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Steven Epstein received his B.A. from Harvard (in Social Studies) and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (in Sociology). After earning his doctorate, he spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow in the Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

Currently he is Professor of Sociology at UCSD, having served on the faculty there since 1994. He is also the Director of UCSD’s Science Studies Program, an interdisciplinary graduate training program in the communication, history, philosophy, and sociology of science, technology, and medicine. In addition, Prof. Epstein is affiliated with the Critical Gender Studies Program and with the Ethnic Studies Department at UCSD.

Prof. Epstein’s areas of academic interest and teaching include: sociology of biomedicine, health, and illness; sociology of science and scientific knowledge; gender, sexuality, race, and biomedicine; health and inequality; science policy and health policy; social movements; sociology of sexuality; lesbian and gay studies; and sociological theory.

Prof. Epstein has been the recipient of prestigious awards, including the American Sociological Association’s award for Dissertation of the Year; numerous book prizes; and UCSD’s top prize for research, the Chancellor’s Associates Faculty Excellence Award (2008). He has been selected as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (2008-09).

Prof. Epstein’s most recent book, Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. The book charts the rise and assesses the consequences of new ways of managing difference (especially gender and race) within biomedical research in the United States. This work was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation and an Investigator Award in Health Policy Research from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Inclusion has been awarded the Robert K. Merton Prize by the American Sociological Association. It has been reviewed in the New England Journal of Medicine and is the focus of a special symposium in the journal Biosocieties.

Previously, Prof. Epstein’s wrote Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (University of California Press, 1996), a study of the politicized production of knowledge in the AIDS epidemic. This book examines the roles of laypeople and activists in transforming medical research. Impure Science was awarded the C. Wright Mills Prize by the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the Robert K. Merton Prize by the American Sociological Association, and the Rachel Carson Prize by the Society for Social Studies of Science. The book was reviewed widely in the mass media (including the New York Times and the Washington Post) and in medical and social science journals (including the New England Journal of Medicine and the American Journal of Sociology). Prof. Epstein is also a coauthor of the book Learning by Heart: AIDS and Schoolchildren in America’s Communities (Rutgers University Press, 1989).