Peter Conrad is an American medical sociologist

Medical sociologist

Medical Sociologist a practitioner of medical sociology. Medical sociologists work within different sociological traditions, including symbolic interactionist, social constructionist traditions, and use a variety of qualitative and quantitative sociological methods. In the UK, major centres for...

 who has researched and published on numerous topics including ADHD, the medicalization

Medicalization

Medicalization is the process by which human conditions and problems come to be defined and treated as medical conditions and problems, and thus come under the authority of doctors and other health professionals to study, diagnose, prevent or treat...

 of deviance, the experience of illness, wellness in the workplace, genetics

Genetics

Genetics , a discipline of biology, is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms....

 in the news, and biomedical enhancements.

Biography

He has been a member of the faculty at Brandeis University

Brandeis University

Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...

 since 1979 and since 1993 has been the Harry Coplan Professor of Social Sciences. He received his B.A. in Sociology at State University of New York at Buffalo (1967), M.A, from Northeastern University (1970) and Ph.D. in Sociology from Boston University

Boston University

Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...

 in 1976. Prior to Brandeis, he taught at Suffolk University (1971–75) and Drake University

Drake University

Drake University is a private, co-educational university located in Des Moines, Iowa, USA. The institution offers a number of undergraduate and graduate programs, as well as professional programs in law and pharmacy. Today, Drake is one of the twenty-five oldest law schools in the country....

 (1975–78). At Brandeis he served as chair of the Department of Sociology for nine years and since 2002 as chair of the interdisciplinary program “Health: Science, Society and Policy” (HSSP). He has also been a visiting professor at New York University

New York University

New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

, Gadjah Mada University

Gadjah Mada University

The Gadjah Mada University is the largest and the oldest national university in Indonesia . founded on December 19, 1949; although the first lecture was given on 13 March 1946. The name was taken from the name of Majapahit's Prime Minister, Gajah Mada.UGM is located in Yogyakarta, Daerah Istimewa...

 (Yogyakarta, Indonesia), University of London

University of London

-20th century:Shortly after 6 Burlington Gardens was vacated, the University went through a period of rapid expansion. Bedford College, Royal Holloway and the London School of Economics all joined in 1900, Regent's Park College, which had affiliated in 1841 became an official divinity school of the...

, Royal Holloway, and Queen’s University-Belfast (Northern Ireland).

Marriage and children

He lives in Lincoln, MA with his wife, Dr. Libby Bradshaw. They have two children, Rya (b. 1980) and Jared (b. 1985).

Published works

Conrad is the author of over one hundred articles and chapters and a dozen books, including Identifying Hyperactive Children: The Medicalization of Deviant Behavior (1975, 2004), Deviance and Medicalization: From Badness to Sickness (with Joseph W. Schneider, 1980, 1992), Having Epilepsy: The Experience and Control of Illness (1983) and The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders (2007). He has also edited or co-edited numerous volumes, including Handbook of Medical Sociology, 5th edition (2000) and eight editions of Sociology of Health and Illness: Critical Perspectives (1981–2009), a widely used text for undergraduates.

Awards

He has received numerous academic honors including the Charles Horton Cooley Award (1981) for Deviance and Medicalization, a Distinguished Fulbright Fellowship (1997), the Leo G. Reeder Award (2004) from the American Sociological Association

American Sociological Association

The American Sociological Association , founded in 1905 as the American Sociological Society , is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the discipline and profession of sociology by serving sociologists in their work and promoting their contributions to serve society.The ASA holds its...

for “distinguished contributions to medical sociology,” and the Lee Founder’s Award (2007) “made in recognition of significant achievements that, over a distinguished career, have demonstrated continuing devotion to the ideals of the founders of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and especially to the humanist tradition of Alfred McClung Lee and Elizabeth Briant Lee.”