Larry Au is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The City College of New York, CUNY. His research examines the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in the production of biomedical knowledge, and asks how clinicians and scientists can better serve their patients and the public. Part of this work examines the globalization of precision medicine—or the use of genomics and other forms of big data to improve diagnosis and treatment—as a policy idea and scientific project, focusing primarily on its rise in China. Another part of this research looks at the politics of expertise around Long Covid, in particular, the experience of patients as they navigate uncertainties around their condition. He is also currently working on his book project Dreams of Global Science: The Transnational Politics of Chinese Biomedical Innovation, which examines how scientific norms and priorities are shaped by a researcher’s location within scientific networks and how geopolitics is influencing science in China.
His work has been published in journals such as Sociological Forum, Qualitative Sociology, Social Science & Medicine, SSM-Qualitative Research in Health, Science Technology & Human Values, Public Understanding of Science, and other venues. This research has been supported by the Luce/ACLS Program in China Studies, the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation through the Trans-Atlantic Platform for Social Sciences and Humanities, the National Institutes of Health’s program on Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD), and other funders, and has received awards such as from the American Sociological Association. He is serving as an elected council member (2023-2025) of the American Sociological Association’s Science, Knowledge, and Technology Section, a co-organizer (2023-2028) of the newly formed Network T: Health at the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, and a member of the editorial board of The Sociological Quarterly.