Rate My Professor Laura Mamo

Laura Mamo is the Health Equity Institute Professor of Public Health in the Department of Public Health at San Francisco State University, where she advances Health Science through her work at the intersection of medical sociology, gender and sexuality studies, and cultural studies of science, technology, and medicine. She earned her PhD in 2002 from the University of California, San Francisco, and her BA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Mamo joined the San Francisco State University faculty in 2010 as Health Equity Professor of Public Health, following her appointments as Assistant Professor and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research and teaching center on sexuality and its politics in medicine, science, and health discourse, practice, and resistance, exploring the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine as they shape population health, health equity, knowledge, power, inequality, and social justice.

Mamo is the author of Sexualizing Cancer: HPV and the Gendered Politics of Cancer Prevention (University of Chicago Press, 2023) and Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience (Duke University Press, 2007). She co-authored Living Green: Communities that Sustain (New Society Press, 2010) and co-edited Biomedicalization Studies: Technoscience and Transformations of Health, Illness and U.S. Biomedicine (Duke University Press, 2010). Her peer-reviewed publications include 'HPV Self-sampling: Cervical Cancer Prevention, Sexual Health Promotion, and the Politics of Health' in Sociology of Health and Illness (2022, Vol. 44, Issue 1: 218-235), 'Orienting Toward Possibility: Girls and Bisexuality at School' in Health Promotion Practice (2021, Vol. 22: 23S-32S), 'The Imaginary of Precision Public Health' in Medical Humanities (2019, Vol. 46, Issue 3: 192-203), 'Intimate Possibilities: The Beyond Bullying Project and Stories of LGBTQ Sexuality and Gender in US Schools' in Harvard Educational Review (2018, 88(2): 163-183), 'The Proliferation of Sexual Health: Diverse Social Problems and the Legitimation of Sexuality' in Social Science & Medicine (2017, 188: 175-90), and 'The New Sexual Politics of Cancer: Oncoviruses, Disease Prevention, and Sexual Health Promotion' in BioSocieties (2016, 12(3): 367-391). Mamo co-founded The Beyond Bullying Project, a multimedia school-based queer sexuality and gender project with Jessica Fields, Jen Gilbert, and Nancy Lesko. Her research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and others.