Faculty Research Highlights
Dr. Liana Woskie recieves Tufts 2024 Springboard Grant.
Affording Misoprostol on Minimum Wage: An International and Local Comparison of Pharmaceutical Abortion
Team Lead: Liana Woskie (A&S)
Team Member(s): Erika Werner (TUSM), Danielle Roncari (TUSM), Irene Papanicolas (Brown Center for Health System Sustainability), MaryRose Mazolla (Planned Parenthood League of MA), and Mindy Roseman (Yale School of Law)
Each of these high-quality, high-impact research, scholarship, and educational initiatives contributes to vibrant research at Tufts by having an explicit plan leading to extramural funding or other outcomes that further influence research, scholarship, and/or policy.
These grants represent a significant investment in the future vitality of Tufts as a thriving R1, very-high research activity university. In keeping with this cycle’s emphasis on supporting Tufts’ efforts to be an anti-racist institution, many of the projects focused on highlighting racial inequities and promoting racial justice.
Dr. Keren Ladin named Greenwall Faculty Scholar
Dr. Keren Ladin was recently named as Greenwall Faculty Scholar by the Greenwall Foundation. The Greenwall Faculty Scholars Program in Bioethics is a career development award to enable junior faculty members to carry out innovative bioethics research. This award supports research that goes beyond current work in bioethics to help resolve pressing ethical issues in clinical care, biomedical research, and public policy.
Dr. Ladin's project incorporates bioethics, social psychology, and health services approaches to examine disparities in transplantation and in access to health care more broadly.
Project abstract:
Although social support is routinely assessed during transplant candidate evaluation, we hypothesize that inconsistent definitions of social support and evaluation procedures may result in unequal treatment of patients with limited support. We hypothesize that clinicians have unconscious bias in favor of more socially connectedness patients, and that this bias will be significantly associated with waitlist decisions. Clinicians may experience moral distress and cognitive dissonance, which occurs when actions (using a discriminatory criterion) do not align with values (treating all patients fairly). Perspective-taking interventions, more supportive center-level and Medicaid policies, and reforming the social support criterion may be needed to reduce this source of bias and ensure equal access to solid organ transplantation.