Corey Abramson

At CASBS, Corey M. Abramson will complete Unequal Anatomies (Oxford), a book drawing on two decades of fieldwork in cancer clinics, dementia care facilities, urban neighborhoods, and other settings to reveal how health and illness transmit prior inequality and shape opportunity structures. Abramson authored The End Game (Harvard University Press, 2015), an award-winning ethnography featured in The New York Times and translated into Korean, and co-edited (with Neil Gong) Beyond the Case (Oxford University Press, 2020), alongside articles in American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, Sociological Methodology, Health Affairs, and elsewhere. Abramson serves as methodologist and data architect for large-scale mixed-methods studies, and through collaborations funded by the NIH and others, has developed methods for scalable, transparent, and reproducible analyses of qualitative data at scale. Beyond the academy, his work informs health systems, community organizations, and government and international agencies.

Abramson is professor of sociology and co-director of the Center for Computational Insights on Inequality and Society (CIISR) at Rice University. His research charts mechanisms connecting inequality, health, and culture over the life course using ethnography, in-depth interviews, and surveys. He combines these data sources with computational social science (machine learning, natural language processing, and AI) to link broad societal patterns and everyday interactions. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.