Shai Mulinari

Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer

Sociology

Research areas

• Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology)
• Public Health, Global Health, Social Medicine and Epidemiology

I am interested in how market forces, government regulation and medical science affect medicines development and use in society. One theme in my research is the regulation of the pharmaceutical industry's business practices, marketing and transparency. In an ongoing project funded by the Swedish Research Council, we analyze transparency regarding financial relations between pharmaceutical companies and other actors such as doctors and patient organizations.

Another theme in my research is how regulatory authorities evaluate medicines and how economic, political and organizational conditions can influence regulatory decisions. Among other things, my research has investigated how regulatory authorities in the USA and Europe have evaluated influenza drugs.

Another theme in my research pertains to more classic themes within the sociology of knowledge such as how scientific “thought styles” as well as financial, professional and scientific interests and specific pieces of technology affect the content and development of research. Among other things, I have written about how financial and scientific interests first converged but then collided during the development of the pharmaceutical company Astra's antidepressant drug Zelmid. I have also described how the development of bio-psychiatric theories since the 1960s was strongly conditioned by the psychiatric drugs that were available to investigate in experimental research. In an ongoing project funded by The Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program - Humanities and Society (WASP-HS), we study the consequences of introducing Artificial Intelligence in biomedicine.

Finally, I am interested in the use of social categories, mainly racial and ethnicity categories, in medical research and especially pharmaceutical research and regulation. In an ongoing project funded by the Swedish Research Council, we therefore analyze the use of racial and ethnicity categories in medical research, policy and practice.