Biography

Jennifer Sarrett, PhD, Med, teaches courses on disability, ethics, health, and human rights. In her classes, she guided students to critically examine how our current and historical structures and attitudes shape the way think about and respond to current health disparities. These topics necessitate an interdisciplinary approach, and her students regularly encounter perspectives from philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, bioethics, history, anthropology, sociology, human geography, and biology. In 2017, she was awarded the Crystal Apple Awards, William H. Fox Award for Emerging Excellence at Emory. 

 As a social scientist, she studies and works in the field of autism and related disabilities for 20 years. This work primarily focuses on these disabilities as a lived experience in various cultural contexts, both locally and internationally. She has presented this work at conferences around the world and in over 20 academic publications and 10 public op-eds. Her scholarship has focused on autism in South India, as the basis of a human rights model, and in media representations since the 1950s. Most recently, she employs qualitative and quantitative methods to explore and address how the criminal justice systems constructs and responds to individuals with disabilities — a population that is largely understudied in criminal justice settings despite the higher prevalence of these disabilities in prisons and jails than the general public. She hopes this work can help inform policies and procedures related to the training of criminal justice professionals and the structures of the systems in which they work.