Joanna Kempner
is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, where she studies how culture, politics, and institutions shape science, medicine, and inequality. Much of her research investigates why some health issues are taken seriously while others are ignored—and how people respond when their experiences are disbelieved, dismissed by healthcare providers, employers, friends, and family, or overlooked by biomedical researchers.
She is the author of Psychedelic Outlaws: The Movement Revolutionizing Modern Medicine (Hachette Books, 2024), which chronicles a patient-led movement that developed a treatment for cluster headache using psychedelic mushrooms, and Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health (Chicago 2014), which won awards from the American Sociological Association and the Society for Medical Anthropology.
Her work has been published in leading journals including Science, PLoS Medicine, Social Science & Medicine, and Neurology, and is often featured in media, like the New York Times, Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, and the BBC. She speaks regularly to academic, clinical, and public audiences, and collaborates with researchers and advocates working to build more just and accountable systems of care.
But mostly, she’s happy to spend time in West Philly with her family, raising two kids, two cats, and a very small poodle.
A Next Big Idea Club “Must-Read Book”
