RWJF Health & Society Scholar:
2007-2009
Discipline(s):
Sociology
Area(s) of Expertise:
Environment, Climate Change, Qualitative Methods, Documentary Filmmaking, Social Movements, Development
E-Mail:
sabrina.mccormick@gmail.com
Personal Webpage: sabrinamccormick.com
Background:
Sabrina McCormick is a sociologist and documentary filmmaker who investigates the sociological dimensions of environmental health and illness. Sabrina grew up in Georgia, where her childhood home was contaminated with an illegal toxic chemical. Twenty years later, during her PhD training in Sociology at Brown University, Sabrina wrote No Family History, about the links between common chemical exposures and breast cancer, and directed an award-winning documentary film on the same topic (www.nofamilyhistory.com). Based on that research and years of ethnography investigating the impacts of energy generation in Brazil, she wrote Mobilizing Science: Movements, Participation and the Remaking of Knowledge about the importance of social movements, science and policy in protecting human health and the environment. Seeing how health is in an important lens through which communities understand emergent environmental issues, she began work on the health impacts of climate change as a Health & Society Scholar at Penn. She then served as a Science & Technology Policy Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the Global Change Research Program at the Environmental Protection Agency, and was a Lead Author on a Special Assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change entitled, “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation.” As Faculty in the Environmental and Occupational Health Department in the School of Public Health and Health Services at George Washington University, and Senior Fellow at the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania, she is now funded by the National Science Foundation to investigate how citizen science is revealing impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. She is also directing a documentary film about the impacts of the spill (www.afterthecap.org). Her new company, Evidence Based Media (www.evidencebasedmedia.net), continues this tradition by working with researchers to communicate the meaning of science. She welcomes fellow researchers to join her in this work.
Journal Articles:
Click here for a list of Sabrina McCormick’s available publications in PubMed.
Interviews:
NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams
Books:
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McCormick, Sabrina. No Family History: The Environmental Links to Breast Cancer. Rowman & Littlefield, 2009
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McCormick, Sabrina. Mobilizing Science: Movements, Participation and the Remaking of Knowledge. Temple University Press, 2009 |
