Daniel Dohan, PhD
Dan Dohan is Professor of Health Policy, Surgery, and Humanities and Social Sciences. His primary campus home is the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies (IHPS) where he serves as Deputy Director and Training Director.
Dan is Principal Investigator of the Medical Cultures Lab (https://www.cultureofmedicine.org). MCL is a scholarly community that approaches medicine as both scientific enterprise and narrative practice. We believe medicine derives its legitimacy from a commitment to healing and justice. MCL works to understand medical culture and advance health equity.
As an educator, Dan works with faculty and fellows on the development of rigorous qualitative studies of medical culture and practice. His work in this area is supported by a K07 Academic Leadership Career Award from the NIH National Institutes of Aging (NIA).
His research projects include a comparative ethnographic examination of diverse experiences of aging, cognitive decline, and decision making — work supported with an NIA DP1 award for Behavioral and Social Research LEaders in Alzheimer’s Disease and Its Related Dementias (NIA BSR LEADR). With Emily Finlayson, Dan is using qualitative techniques to document the implementation of an intervention to improve older adults’ readiness for major surgery through clinic culture change. With Winston Chiong, he is exploring social and ethical issues surrounding the use of "closed loop" implanted neurostimulation devices as novel treatments for epilepsy and other neurological conditions.
Dan received his PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley. A book based on his dissertation, The Price of Poverty: Money, Work, and Culture in the Mexican-American Barrio, was published by the University of California Press in 2003.