Sharon Batt

Sharon (@haronba) entered a doctoral program at Dalhousie as an Interdisciplinary PhD student with a CIHR fellowship in the CIHR Training Program in Ethics of Health Research and Policy. She conducted her PhD research under Dr. Janice Graham’s supervision and graduated in May 2012. Her dissertation, a study of the policy implications of pharmaceutical company funding of patients' groups, was awarded the Dalhousie University Faculty of Graduate Studies Doctoral Thesis Award for the university's most outstanding doctoral thesis in the humanities and social sciences. She is currently finalizing a book manuscript based on this research. She is a member of Dr. Graham's Technoscience and Regulation Research Unit (TRRU) at Dalhousie and had a 2012 fellowship from the Pharmaceutical Policy Research Collaborative (PPRC).

Before returning to graduate school, Sharon worked as a journalist and community activist, work that informs her scholarly research. Following a cancer diagnosis in 1988, she co-founded the organization Breast Cancer Action Montreal. Her book Patient No More: the Politics of Breast Cancer (Gynergy Press), published in 1994, won the 1995 Laura Jamieson Award for the best feminist book published in Canada. Her work in breast cancer politics led her to broader activism in the women's health movement, environmental health, and pharmaceutical policy. In 1999 she was awarded a two-year appointment to the Nancy's Chair in Women's Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax and from 2001 to 2003 she held the Elizabeth May Chair in Women's Health and the Environment at Dalhousie University. Since 1998 she has been on the steering committee of Women and Health Protection, a coalition of community groups, journalists, and academics concerned about the safety of pharmaceutical drugs. She contributed three chapters to the book The Push to Prescribe: Women and Canadian Drug Policy published in 2010 (Women's Press).

A book chapter based on her dissertation research appears in the edited collection The Public Shaping of Medical Research: Patient Associations, Health Movements and Biomedicine (Routledge) in 2015 (reviewed in The Sociology of Health and Illness).

A review essay on corruption in the pharmaceutical industry and the moral crisis in medicine is forthcoming in the Hastings Center Report in 2016.

Sharon Batt, PhD

Researcher and Writer, Health & Pharmaceutical Policy, TRRU

Adjunct Professor, Department of Bioethics

Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS