Jaimie Morse, Ph.D., MPH

Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
University of California, Santa Cruz

• jmorse1@ucsc.edu
• @jaimienmorse
• UCSC Webpage

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Jaimie Morse, Ph.D., MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Senior Visiting Fellow with the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale University.

Dr. Morse’s research lies at the intersection of medicine, law, culture, and science and technology studies (STS). Broadly speaking, her work examines the politics of knowledge in biomedicine and global health, with a focus on the interplay between law, health, and human rights advocacy in processes of policy change.

Dr. Morse seeks to bridge humanistic and interpretive approaches in the social sciences with applied research that is policy relevant and public-facing. Her work advances scholarship on the intersections of health and law, with a focus on health justice and the constitutive role of law in what comes to count as credible knowledge and best practice in biomedical and healthcare settings. She draws on comparative and historical methods to examine how emergent technologies, therapeutics, and conceptualizations of a “human right” to health travel transnationally and with what impacts.

Her current book project examines these dynamics through the emergence of the sexual assault medical forensic exam (commonly known as the “rape kit”) as a tool of anti-rape activism in emergency medicine in the United States since the 1970s and its adaptation for use with refugees and internally displaced persons to document rape as a war crime.

Prior to earning her Ph.D., she worked for 10 years in the field of public health, domestically and internationally. Her award-winning work has been published in Genocide Studies and Prevention, Social Science & Medicine, and Osiris, and has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Newcombe and Woodrow Wilson Fellowships, and the Brocher Foundation.

Dr. Morse received her B.A. in Political Science and Economics from the University of California, Berkeley; her master’s degree in public health from UCLA; and her Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University. At UC Santa Cruz, she is affiliated with the Legal Studies program, the Science and Justice Research Center, and the Global and Community Health Initiative.