Kelly Joyce, Ph.D. 2001

“I love thinking critically about the cultural, economic, and political dimensions of healthcare and scientific knowledge,” says Kelly Joyce, Ph.D. 2001. Joyce is co-editor, with Colgate University’s Meika Loe, of Technogenarians: Studying Health and Illness Through an Ageing, Science, and Technology Lens. “Sociology has an excellent group of scholars working on aging, but even this can be overshadowed by sociologists’ more general interest in younger people,” says Joyce. “I am particularly intrigued in how old people adapt and use technologies that are initially made for younger, able-bodied people.”

“Good social science starts from paying attention to your interests and what is going on around you,” she says. Now an associate professor of sociology at the College of William and Mary, Joyce’s interest lies at the intersection of medicine, science, and technology. Joyce is also the author of Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency, an exploration of the culture and the science of magnetic resonance imaging, which won the 2010 Eliot Freidson Outstanding Publication Award from the American Sociological Association. Joyce is currently on leave from William and Mary, serving as a program director at the National Science Foundation, where she develops new areas of inquiry, conducts outreach to scholarly communities, and reviews and recommends proposals for funding.

Joyce remembers the Boston College sociology program as a lively place of intellectual exchange. “The sociology faculty are engaged teachers and researchers who show students what it means to be innovative scholars, imaginative teachers, and members of a broader intellectual community,” she says. "The graduate students drawn to the program are similarly creative, curious, and clever. This combination created a vibrant milieu where exchanges about what it meant to be a social scientist occurred in seminars and coursework as well as in corridors and other spontaneous discussions."