Research Themes

Trust, Expertise, and Public Health

Public disagreement about science is often attributed to ignorance or misunderstanding. My research challenges this view by showing how responses to scientific authority are
structured by trust. In contexts such as vaccine hesitancy, what appears as resistance to evidence is often better understood as responses to institutions, decision-making
processes, and the credibility of experts.

This work reframes public resistance to science as a problem of epistemic trust rather than knowledge deficit. It shows how trust is not merely an attitude held by individuals,
but a feature of institutional relationships that shape how knowledge claims are received and evaluated.

My research in this area has contributed to a broader shift in public health and science communication research, moving away from models that focus on correcting beliefs and
toward analyses of how authority is established and sustained.

Selected publications

Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise, and the War on Science. University of Pittsburgh Press (2021)
“Public Misunderstanding of Science? Reframing the Problem of Vaccine Hesitancy.” Perspectives on Science 24:5, 552-581 (2016)
“Public Trust in Science.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 48:2, 366-378 (2023)

Connection to broader work
This research forms the foundation for my later work on expertise, misinformation, and epistemic governance, where questions of trust are extended into a broader analysis of
how authority is structured across scientific and public contexts.

Back to all Research Themes