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Rachel Best is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan. Beginning in 2014, she will be an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. In her research, she analyzes how societies define problems and marshal public resources to address them. Across a wide range of issues—diseases, homelessness, and employment discrimination—she shows how advocacy and culture create inequalities in policy.


Research and teaching interests:

  • Medical Sociology
  • Sociology of Law
  • Political Sociology
  • Social Movements
  • Culture
  • Research Methods and Statistics