Laura Senier
Associate Professor of Sociology and Health Sciences; Undergraduate Program Director, Sociology and Anthropology
Laura Senier’s research interests include the sociology of medicine and public health, community environmental health, and environmental justice. Her research identifies political, social, and economic barriers in research translation, or the effort to migrate scientific discoveries into clinical and public health practice. She has also studied community mobilization in communities burdened by environmental injustices, in the Boston area and in the upper Midwest.
Green, Ridgely F., Marie T. Kumerow, Juan L. Rodriguez, Siobhan Addie, Sarah H. Beachy, and Laura Senier. 2020. Implementing cancer genomics in state health agencies: mapping activities to an implementation science outcome framework. Public Health Genomics Sept 2020: 1-12. Doi: 10.1159/0005100336. PMID: 32942283.
Senier, Laura, Colleen M. McBride, Alex Ramsey, Vence L. Bonham, and David Chambers. 2019. “Blending insights from implementation science and the social sciences to mitigate disparities in screening for hereditary cancer syndromes.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
Senier, Laura, *Leandra Smollin, *Rachael Lee, *Lauren Nicoll, *Michael Shields, and *Catherine Tan. 2018. “Navigating the evidentiary turn in public health: sensemaking strategies to integrate genomics into state-level chronic disease prevention programs.” Social Science & Medicine 211: 207-215. PMCID: PMC6067973
Senier, Laura, Phil Brown, Sara Shostak, and *Bridget Hanna. 2017. “The socio-exposome: advancing exposure science and environmental justice in a postgenomic era.” Environmental Sociology 3: 107-121. PMCID: PMC5604315
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Education
PhD, Sociology
Brown University, 2009 -
Contact
617.373.2687 l.senier@northeastern.edu -
Address
934 Renaissance Park
360 Huntington Avenue,
Boston, MA 02115
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Sociology of Health and Illness
SOCL 3441
Offers a substantial overview of the sociology of health and illness. Medical sociology is an important subfield of sociology with important links to public health, social psychology, psychology, and other medical fields. Emphasizes several critical areas: society and disease; theoretical understandings of health inequalities; medicalization and social control; healthcare professions and professionalization; and the American healthcare system. Offers students an opportunity to obtain analytical frameworks to explore other topics in medical sociology not covered in this course.
Qualitative Methods in Health and Illness
PHTH 6320
Discusses qualitative inquiry in general and specifically in topics related to public health and experiences of self, health, illness, and the body. Qualitative research aims to achieve in-depth and contextual understanding of people, culture, and societies and usually employs texts, interviews, published materials, images, and focus group discussions as sources of data. The course integrates theoretical and methodological readings and discussions with designing and conducting a qualitative project. Offers students an opportunity to understand meanings of health, illness, and the body in a variety of “local worlds” and reflect on their importance for informing policy, public health, research, and practice. Requires prior completion of one undergraduate- or graduate-level course in research methods.
