Past Awards
ROBIN BADGLEY AWARD
Andrea Polonijo: winner of the 2019 Robin Badgley Memorial Student Award
The 2019 Robin Badgley Memorial Student Award was presented to Andrea Polonijo for her paper “Social Inequalities in the Diffusion of Health Promoting Innovations: Evaluating the Impact of Mandates on Human Papillomavirus Vaccination.”
Andrea is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social Medicine, Population, & Public Health at the University of California, Riverside. Trained in medical sociology and public health, she studies how social factors such as income, education, race-ethnicity, and sexual orientation influence health behaviours and health outcomes.
Her current research focuses on social inequalities in vaccination, in local, national, and international contexts. She is leading two pilot studies in California’s Inland Empire. The first study aims to develop and evaluate a community-based intervention that bundles HPV and meningitis vaccination with rapid HIV testing. The second study aims to identify barriers and facilitators to HPV vaccination among adults aged 27–45, who are newly eligible for the vaccine. At the national level, she is leading a quantitative survey of US adults to examine the association between prosocial attitudes and social inequalities in vaccination. She is also collaborating on an international project that examines how family- and community-level socioeconomic status shape childhood vaccination in Denmark.
Hadi Karsoho: winner of the 2016 Robin Badgley Memorial Student Award
The 2016 Robin Badgley Memorial Student Award was presented to Hadi Karsoho for his paper “Articulating Suffering with the Role of Medicine at the End of Life: The Case of Physician-Assisted Dying.” Hadi Karsoho is a Ph.D. candidate at McGill University in the Departments of Sociology and Social Studies of Medicine. Hadi’s research program is broadly concerned with questions of contemporary death and dying that lie at the intersection of medicine, ethics, and law. For his doctoral thesis, Hadi examines how different stakeholders come together in one notable litigation, Carter v. Canada, to debate the legality and ethics of physician-assisted dying (i.e., medical assistance in dying). Carter resulted in the decriminalization of physician-assisted dying in Canada in 2016 and, to the best of our knowledge, Hadi’s research is the first in-depth, empirical examination of the landmark court case. Hadi’s thesis forms part of a larger research project, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), on public controversies of medicalized dying in Canada.
Tania Jenkins: winner of the 2014 Robin Badgley Memorial Student Award
Tania Jenkins’ winning submission is a single-authored paper titled “‘It’s Time She Stopped Torturing Herself’ Medical Paternalism in End-Of-Life Care Among Internal Medicine Residents.”
Tania M. Jenkins is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Brown University in Providence, RI (USA). In 2010, she was awarded the SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship to support her doctoral training. Her research interests are centred around medical sociology, particularly the medical profession, professional stratification, sociology of diagnosis and ethnography. Tania’s dissertation research examines the (re)production of status inequalities among internal medicine residents in the United States. Through a comparative hospital ethnography of two medical centers, she explores how educational pedigree (i.e. where residents went to medical school) affects trainees’ opportunities in residency and beyond.
Prior to her Ph.D., Tania obtained an MA from McGill University, where her SSHRC-funded master’s research examined the relationship between access to primary care and socio-economic status in Quebec, using a mixed-methods approach. Her Master’s work earned her several accolades, including the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada Joseph and Sandra Rotman prize for Student Excellence in Public Policy Innovation, as well as the Governor General of Canada’s Academic Excellence Gold Medal.
She currently has two sole-authored publications in Qualitative Health Research and Health, as well as co-authored manuscripts in BMC: Health Services, Social Science & Medicine and American Journal of Public Health.