Q&A with Joseph Bruch

A white man with brown curly hair is smiling. He is wearing a black suit, black and white striped tie, and sits against a window. The background of the photo is blurred.

This fall, Joe Bruch became a professor of public health sciences at The University of Chicago. He completed his PhD in Population Health Sciences at Harvard University. Joe has been an active member of GSL since its founding and directs the Health Care Finance team. He also mentors graduate and undergraduates in the lab. 

GSL: Congratulations, Joe! We’re delighted for you. What are you most excited about in this new faculty position?

I am excited to put time into developing my research and creating a more expansive research agenda. During grad school and my postdoc, I started to do this, but I now want to take the next couple of years to cultivate a research stream that combines my different interests in social epidemiology, health care finance, and feminist science studies.

 I am also frankly interested in joining the Faculty Club at UChicago. I have no sense of whether 1) it exists or 2) whether a faculty appointment is sufficient for membership, but I have long wondered what goes on in these spaces, and I plan to find out.


GSL: How did you come to be interested in feminist science studies?

During undergrad, I took a bunch of classes centered on queer theories and Black feminist studies, and I found the types of questions being asked and the types of frameworks being used transformative. At the same time, I was interested in research science and was also taking a bunch of bench science as well as social science courses. Both worlds seemed very distinct. However, when I came across feminist science studies, the distinction entirely disappeared. This notion that science is apolitical, objective, and devoid of values or judgments always confused me. Feminist science studies offered a critical scholarly angle by which to appreciate the socially situated nature of all scientific research and to recognize how systems and structures influence both the practice and substance of science. This is particularly important for social epidemiologists who must constantly be attending to the role of the “social” in producing health outcomes. Feminist science studies offers meaningful methods and epistemologies for studying patterns of disease and health outcomes.  


GSL: Tell us about your work in the GenderSci Lab. What is your role in the Lab and what sort of research do you do?

I have been in lab leadership for the last couple of years and have been fortunate to see the lab grow since its inception when I was in graduate school. Currently, I direct the Health Care Finance Team within the Lab. The mission of the Health Care Finance Team is to probe the business of health and health care management and its implications for women and gender minorities. We are among the first to evaluate private equity and venture capital's influence on reproductive health care access and quality, and have produced the first landscape analysis of the femtech industry. Currently, we are examining the role of financial investment in the women’s health industry. 


GSL: What kind of research and teaching do you hope to do at UChicago?

I hope to teach courses on social epidemiology as well as courses on the business of health and health care. Similarly, my research will cut between traditional health policy research focused on the financing of health care as well as more social epidemiology research that explores the links between financial services/institutions and population health.  I am also a faculty affiliate at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at U Chicago.

Suggested Citation

Bruch, J. “Q&A with Joseph Bruch” GenderSci Lab Blog. 2022 Oct. 26. genderscilab.org/blog/q-and-a-with-prof-joseph-bruch

Statement of intellectual labor

Kelsey Ichikawa and Sarah Richardson generated the questions and Joe Bruch provided his responses.

Sarah Richardson