Health Sciences and Biomedical Technologies

Our work explores health practices in the post-genomic era, biomodifying technologies, antimicrobial resistance, the gender and materialities of illness, disease, caring and aging.

We also work on developing distinctive and important social science understandings of patterns and governance of health and disease in a global context. We ask:

• How do new biomedical formations challenge social formations and infrastructures, including ethical values underpinning policy interventions and medical practice?
• How can biomedicine help accomplish new forms of care, justice and social inclusion, through new forms of knowledge production distribution and exchange across the North and the South that are de-centered and non-hegemonic?

Our researchers

• Professor Ellen Annandale
• Dr Vanessa Ashall
• Professor Nik Brown
• Dr Sangeeta Chattoo
• Dr Jennifer Chubb 
• Peter Coventry
• Joanna Latimer
• Dr Frank Soboczenski

Selected publications

• Shearsmith, L., Coventry, P. A., Sloan, C., Henry, A., Newbronner, L., Littlewood, E., ... & Chew-Graham, C. (2023). Acceptability of a behavioural intervention to mitigate the psychological impacts of COVID-19 restrictions in older people with long-term conditions: a qualitative study. BMJ open, 13(3), e064694.
• Wallace BC, Saha S, Soboczenski F, Marshall IJ. Generating (Factual?) Narrative Summaries of RCTs: Experiments with Neural Multi-Document Summarization. AMIA Jt Summits Transl Sci Proc. 2021 May 17;2021:605-614. PMID: 34457176; PMCID: PMC8378607.
• Samuel, G., Chubb, J., & Derrick, G. (2021). Boundaries between research ethics and ethical research use in artificial intelligence health research. Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics, 16(3), 325-337.
• Iain J Marshall, Benjamin Nye, Joël Kuiper, Anna Noel-Storr, Rachel Marshall, Rory Maclean, Frank Soboczenski, Ani Nenkova, James Thomas, Byron C Wallace, Trialstreamer: A living, automatically updated database of clinical trial reports, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Volume 27, Issue 12, December 2020, Pages 1903–1912, 
• Annandale, E. C., & Hilario, A. P. (2020). Together apart? Securing health amid health inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe (RN16). The European Sociologist, 45 (1).
• Soboczenski, F., Trikalinos, T.A., Kuiper, J. et al. Machine learning to help researchers evaluate biases in clinical trials: a prospective, randomized user study. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak 19, 96 (2019). 
• Brown, N. G. F. (2019). Immunitary Life: A biopolitics of immunity. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Latimer, J. & López Gómez, D. (eds.) (2019) Intimate Entanglements.The Sociological Monograph Series. London: Sage.,
• Milne, R., & Latimer (eds) (2019) Alzheimer’s Disease and the Evolution of a Postgenomic Science, New Genetics and Society. 39 (1).
• Hillman, A. & Latimer, J. (2019) Somaticization, the making and unmaking of minded persons and the fabrication of dementia. Social Studies of Science, 49(2): 208-226. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312719834069
• Latimer, J. (2019) Science Under Siege? being alongside the life sciences of ageing, giving science life.The Sociological Review. 67(2): 264-286.
• Latimer, J. and López Gómez , D. (2019) Affects, more-than-human intimacies and the politics of relations in Science and Technology. The Sociological Review. 67 (2): 247-263.
• Chattoo, S. (2018). Inherited blood disorders, genetic risk and global public health: framing 'birth defects' as preventable in India. Anthropology & Medicine, 25(1), 30-49.