By Robert Klitzman, M.D.
Academic Director, M.S. in Bioethics
Renée C. Fox, Columbia University's Annenberg Professor Emerita of the Social Sciences, advisory board member to Columbia's Bioethics program and pioneer in the field of medical sociology, died on September 23, 2020 due to leukemia.
Before joining the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1969, Renée C. Fox was a member of the Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research, taught for twelve years at Barnard College, and then spent two years as a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard. At the University of Pennsylvania, she was a professor in the Department of Sociology with joint, secondary appointments in the Departments of Psychiatry and Medicine, and in the School of Nursing. She also held an interdisciplinary chair as the Annenberg Professor of the Social Sciences. From 1972-1978 she served as the Chair of the Penn Sociology Department. On July 1, 1998, she became the Annenberg Professor Emerita of the Social Sciences. She is also an Emerita Senior Fellow of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Fox’s major teaching and research interests – sociology of medicine, medical research, medical education, and medical ethics – have involved her in first-hand, participant observation-based studies in Continental Europe (particularly in Belgium), in Central Africa (especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo), and in the People’s Republic of China, as well as in the United States. She lectured in colleges, universities, and medical schools throughout the United States, and has taught in a number of universities abroad. During the 1996-1997 academic year, she was the George Eastman Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford. She was also the author of more than nine books and numerous articles.
Her full obituary is available to read in The New York Times.
On behalf of the Bioethics program, and all of us at the School of Professional Studies, we feel honored to have been a part of Renée's life, and our thoughts are with her family and friends.
