Nancy Davenport
Affiliations
- Graduate Student Fellow, Department of Sociology
- Program Affliate, Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars Program
Research
Nancy Davenport is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology. She attended Cornell as an undergraduate, majoring in philosophy and concentrating in women's studies. Her research interests include the history of population studies and the disappearance of eugenics as a named scientific field, science and technology, and medical decision-making. Her dissertation investigates the use of actors paid to pretend to be patients in physician training. Increasingly in medical education, apprentice physicians are paired with these "standardized patients" in brief recitals designed to mimic encounters with unscripted patients. Her dissertation investigates the relation between simulated encounters with standardized patients, and clinic- or hospital-based encounters with unscripted patients.
