Faculty Spotlight: Sara Shostak
Every month, we interview a faculty member for our undergraduate newsletter. In April 2022, we spoke to Sara Shostak, Professor of Sociology and Health: Science, Society and Policy.
Can you tell us a little about your academic background and journey to Brandeis?
I began my undergraduate studies with the intention of preparing for medical school. During my first year, however, I realized that my interests and aptitudes were much more in the social sciences. As a student and an activist, I was particularly interested in how communities come together to create social change. After graduating from college, I volunteered for the Stop AIDS Project, in San Francisco, which used the principles of community organizing to address the HIV/AIDS crisis. Inspired by this experience, I went to the UCLA School of Public Health where I did a MPH in the Department of Community Health Sciences. While I was at the School of Public Health, I was fortunate to get a research assistantship at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, where I became passionate about the ways that research can inform public policy. I moved back to San Francisco to do my PhD in medical sociology at UCSF, where I studied how changes in environmental health science affect policy making and advocacy for environmental health and justice (I wrote a book about this!). After I completed my PhD, I did two postdocs — one at the National Institutes of Health and one at Columbia University — on my way to Brandeis.
What is the focus of your current research?
In different ways, my current research focuses on the connections between food, justice, and health. My most recent book, "Back to the Roots," is about urban agriculture in Massachusetts. I also have done a number of collaborative projects with local urban agriculture organizations, including a study of community gardens in Boston and Lynn (with The Food Project) and an evaluation of a mobile farmers' market in Somerville. I just completed a critical analysis of program evaluation in urban agriculture, which looks at the tensions between organizations' food justice missions and the metrics they are asked to use to evaluate their programs. As a follow up, I have been interviewing representatives of philanthropies that fund food system interventions, to learn more about their motivations and how they define (and measure) the outcomes of their investments.
How have undergraduate students supported your research?
I have had wonderful experiences working with undergraduate students on research, including their projects and my own! I actually became interested in studying food justice while I was advising an undergraduate student, Jen Mandelbaum, who had a Schiff Fellowship to study school based garden-to-table programs as a public health intervention. In my projects on urban agriculture, students have participated by coding data, doing analysis, and helping with report writing. Sometimes, they also do the data collection itself! For example, in 2016, my HSSP capstone class partnered with the Urban Farming Institute of Boston in support of the revitalization of the Fowler Clark Epstein Farm in Mattapan; the students in that class did team projects, which they designed, and oral histories about food and health and community in the neighborhood. In 2020, Tamar Harrison took the lead on another project with UFI, in which she studied the benefits of the Fit Around the Farm Program. In summer 2020, Professor Wendy Cadge and I worked with two undergraduate students, Sophie Trachtenberg and Mariah Lewis, on a study of the experiences of frontline providers in COVID-19 ICUs.
What excites you about working with Brandeis students?
When I was interviewing for what is now my job, I met with undergraduate students in Pearlman Hall. When I asked them about their experiences at Brandeis, one of the students told me that what she loved about being a Sociology major at Brandeis is that "we don't just sit around talking about everything that is wrong with the world, we try to make things better." In the years that I have been at Brandeis, I have seen so many ways that Brandeis students devote themselves to the work of repairing the world. I see this in how our community values kindness, in how many hours our students devote to service and advocacy, and in how seriously students take their academics. I'm excited and grateful to be part of this work and to support students in their journeys.