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Research Fellow; Assistant Professor (eff 9/1/14)

• Affiliation(s)

  • Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program

• Fields of Study

  • Health and Healthcare
  • Culture and Knowledge

• About

  Rachel Best is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Research program. After completing the program in 2014, she will be an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. Her research asks how policies and laws respond to social problems. Across a wide range of issues, she studies how advocacy and culture create inequalities in policy and law. One ongoing line of research investigates inequalities in employment discrimination litigation. Another explores the consequences of the emergence of a new form of advocacy: interest groups targeting specific diseases. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, she finds that disease advocacy had surprising cultural effects on politics, changing how policymakers evaluate claims and judge the worthiness of potential recipients. The study also asks why lobbying for research into new medical treatments has overshadowed movements seeking research on environmental causes of disease and advocacy for expanded access to medical care.

• Education

  • Ph.D. University of California at Berkeley, 2012

• Research Areas of Interest

  • Political Sociology, Sociology of Law, Social Movements, Medical Sociology