Phil Brown is Professor of Sociology at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He received his doctorate from Brandeis University. He is currently examining "contested illnesses" such as asthma, Gulf War-related illnesses and breast cancer, involving public debates over environmental causes. This four-year project is supported by grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research, and the National Science Foundation. Among his other research interests are gender, race and class bias in the burden of environmental hazards, and social movements and community responses to toxic waste contamination . He is the author of No Safe Place: Toxic Waste, Leukemia, and Community Action (Phil Brown and Edwin Mikkelsen). His third edition of Perspectives in Medical Sociology has just been published and his edited collection Illness and the Environment: A Reader in Contested Medicine (Steve Kroll-Smith, Phil Brown, and Valerie Gunter) will appear in summer 2000. Prior to studying health and the environment, he studied mental health policy, mental patients' rights, and clinical interaction in psychiatric settings. Among his publications from that work are The Transfer of Care: Psychiatric Deinstitutionalization and Its Aftermath, and Mental Health Care and Social Policy (edited).