Katherine Thomson teaches a variety of courses at USF,
including: Introduction to Sociology, Sociological Theory,
Sociological Methods, Social Worlds of Children, Environmental
Justice, and Senior Capstone. She also heads many directed studies,
especially with students wishing to pursue independent research on
topics pertaining to health and medicine.
She is a UCSF graduate with a PhD in Medical Sociology and research
interests in minority health, health disparities, and the social
construction of biomedical knowledge. Over the past ten years, she
has investigated numerous controversies in health and biomedicine,
such as: the targeting of gay communities by tobacco companies
(2002-2006), feminist activism and contestation of hormone
replacement therapies (2004-2007), community based activism on the
environmental causes of early puberty and breast cancer
(2007-2010), and epidemiological understandings of racial health
disparities in the age of genomic medicine (2007-current). She is
continuing to interview community-based breast cancer activists
within the Bay Area. Her upcoming projects will explore the
implementation of "biobanking" practices in large cohorts of
medical test subjects, attending to the processes and
social/ethical tensions and activism that has arisen due to
concerns about the collection and storage of human genetic
material. Her work appears in the American Journal of Public Health and
BioSocieties.
