Karen Albright, PhD, MSW, MA

Karen’s primary research interests focus on the health needs and behaviors among socioeconomically disadvantaged communities and underserved populations, as well as the barriers they face in accessing care. She is particularly interested in the experiences, diagnoses, and treatments related to poor physical and mental health within these groups, and she typically employs innovative, community-engaged research methods to thoughtfully and impactfully investigate these topics. For her work in this area, she was awarded the highly competitive Loan Repayment Fellowship in Clinical Research from the National Institutes of Health.

Identifying barriers to care and testing potential solutions for mitigating them are high priorities in Karen’s work. A substantial number of her publications investigate the perspectives of various stakeholders (e.g., health care providers, health care staff, patients, and/or patients’ caregivers) toward health care approaches, technologies, and experiences. This line of work emphasizes the development and implementation of various interventions to improve stakeholder experiences and outcomes. To support and advance this work, she has been trained in human-centered design from the Center for Health Progress.

The impact of systems and organizational dynamics on patient and provider experiences, workflows, and, ultimately, health outcomes is a particularly salient theme in Karen’s research. She seeks to understand how organizational and institutional structures, cultures, and processes affect dynamics within and across the health care ecosystem, not only for socioeconomically disadvantaged patients and consumers, but also for providers in the system. Understanding these dynamics has significant implications for the development and implementation of interventions. She is interested in understanding both the constraints and the opportunities that system dynamics present, and her work typically offers recommendations to improve system functionality and effectiveness. This aspect of her work was developed during her training at the National Institutes of Health’s Institute for Systems Science and Health.

As a social scientist, Karen is committed to the application of social scientific methods to the study of health and the health care system—and, more broadly, to the dissemination and translation of data to advance both the scholarly and public good. Her commitment to this application includes her work to advance the knowledge and practice of qualitative methodologies and mixed methods research design, as well as her work studying and supporting the dissemination of information to lay audiences. Her commitment to dissemination and translation of data is also evidenced in her long history of leadership roles in disciplinary organizations devoted to making social science actionable beyond the ivory tower, including as president of the Association for Applied and Clinical Sociology and as chair of the American Sociological Association’s section for Sociological Practice and Public Sociology. It is also evidenced in the podcast she developed and hosts, Beyond the Jargon, the mission of which is to make scientific research more accessible to a wider (i.e., non-academic) audience.