Helena Hansen: developing structural humility in medicine

Abstract

Helena Hansen is Co-chair for the Research Theme in Health Equity and Translational Social Science and Associate Director of the Center for Social Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA. She helped shaped this role before taking it up in 2021, lobbying the dean of the medical school for the inclusion of translational social science: “My pitch to her was that in the US, we don’t take social knowledge seriously in medicine…we talk about translational science, which is bench to bedside, and I said we need translational social science, to field and community to bedside.” Hansen, who is also Professor of Psychiatry, says she seeks to “to bridge the social sciences and the humanities, and social scholarship more broadly, with the medical school…One of my big interests is what I’ve been calling biosocial research, research that really takes seriously the interface between biological systems and social systems; so how do social requirements influence physiology, gene expression, biological response? Academic medicine does not have the robust social models or social methods to look at the social part of that interface, so that's a part of what the theme is trying to support, importing these from the social sciences”.