Renée Claire Fox

Dr. Renee C. Fox is the Sociology Annenberg Professor Emerita of the Social Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1969, she was a member of the Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research, taught for twelve years at Barnard College, and then spent two years as a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard. Her major teaching and research interests include sociology of medicine, medical research, medical education, medical ethics, bioethics, and medical humanitarian  action. Her research has involved her in participant observation-based, ethnographic studies in Continental Europe (particularly Belgium, and also in France), in Central Africa (especially the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire -- once the Belgian Congo),  in the People's Republic of China, and in Russia. She has published many articles and books over the  course of  a long professional career.  Her most recent book, published in  2014 by the Johns Hopkins University Press, is  Doctors Without Borders:  Humanitarian Quests, Impossible Dreams of Medecins Sans Frontieres. She is the holder of a Radcliffe Graduate School Medal, and of a Centennial Medal from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University, and is a recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Leo G. Reeder Award for Distinguished Contributions to Medical Sociology. She has received several teaching awards: an E. Harris Harbison Gifted Teaching Award of the Danforth Foundation, and a Lindback Foundation Award for Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds eleven honorary degrees, and in 1995, the Belgian Government named her Chevalier of the Order of Leopold II. In October 2007, she was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.