Susan Kelly

My research interests centre around the development of new biomedical forms of investigation and intervention into human bodies and beings, focusing particularly on the arenas of reproduction (prenatal testing and diagnosis), psychiatric genetics, childhood disorders, and complex diseases. My current interests focus on implications of next generation sequencing and post-genomic science for biomedical understanding and clinical practice; for example, applications of post-genomic technologies to understanding processes of, and intervening in, human reproduction; and problems of interpretation and clinical introduction of whole genome sequencing data. I am also interested in the increasing salience of microchimerism from a longstanding interest in gestational cell transfer, other produced and natural forms of chimerism, and related technologies of 'visibility'.

As director of the Health, Technology and Society (HTS) Research Group, which has grown out of Egenis (ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society), I oversee the research activities of a group of research fellows involved in a variety of projects examining developments in the science and technology of medicine, genomic medicine in particular. Our work can be summed up as focusing primarily on the implications of technological innovation for the sociological understanding of diagnosis, and we are part of a new network of scholars in the sociology of diagnosis. We are collaborating with a number of research groups in the UK and beyond, developing projects on the implementation of new diagnostic technologies. I am interested in research methodologies in sociology and health-related research, and seek to employ novel methodological approaches. I teach modules on sociology of health and illness, disability, and the body, social theory, and methods at the undergraduate level, and research methods in sociology at the post graduate level.

My work is informed by doctoral training at UCSF (sociology of health and illness, and qualitative research methods) and subsequent postdoctoral training at Stanford University in genetics, bioethics and history and philosophy of science.