Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Professor of Social Medicine, Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Culture and Medicine, studies the profession of medicine and biotechnology and bioethics in the United States and internationally, particularly Indonesia and East Africa. In her recent research, "Clinical Narratives and the Political Economy of Hope in American Oncology," Professor Good investigates how oncologists shape experiences of illness and treatment through the clinical stories they create for and with their patients.

Her most recent publications include "Cultural Studies of Biomedicine: An Agenda for Research," in Social Science & Medicine 1995; (with Timothy Marjoribanks) "Physicians' Discourses on Malpractice and the Meaning of Malpractice," in Journal of Health and Social Behavior 1996; (with Byron Good) "Clinical Narratives and the Study of Contemporary Doctor-Patient Relationships," in Gary L. Albrecht, Ray Fitzpatrick and Susan C. Scrimshaw, eds., The Handbook of Social Studies in Health and Medicine (London: Sage Publications Ltd.: 2000); (with Byron Good) "'Fiction' and 'Historicity' in Doctors' Stories: Social and Narrative Dimensions of Learning Medicine," in Cheryl Mattingly and Linda Garro, eds., Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); and "Clinical Realities and Moral Dilemmas: Contrasting Perspectives from Academic Medicine in Kenya, Tanzania, and America" (Daedalus Fall 1999). In American Medicine: The Quest for Competence (University of California Press 1995, 1998 pb), Professor Good addresses questions of medical error and malpractice, gender and medical politics in primary care, innovations in medical education and clinical narratives in oncology. She has also published Pain as Human Experience (1994) with Paul Brodwin, Arthur Kleinman and Byron Good, and many articles and book chapters on biomedicine, International health, women's and children's health and mental health. She has been Editor-in-Chief with Byron Good of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry: An international journal of comparative cross-cultural research, since 1987. Professor Good has served on the Ad Hoc Review Committee on Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues in the Human Genome project (ELSI) for NIH and the UN Task Force on Policy on Women's Health. She teaches and advises medical students, post-doctoral fellows, visiting scholars and graduate students as well as undergraduates.