A. Emiko Blalock, PhD, is an assistant professor in the tenure system. Prior to joining the Department of Family Medicine, Emiko was an assistant professor in the Office of Medical Education Research and Development, and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education in the College of Education at Michigan State University. She earned her PhD in Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education in 2019.
As a social scientist, Emiko draws on organizational and sociological lenses to address problems of social inequities and how these inequities are reproduced in medical education. As a qualitative researcher Emiko leverages critical, narrative, and placed-based methodologies and analyses, specifically those that elevate the individual and communal experience. Three intertwining strands of inquiry shape Emiko’s research: 1) employing culturally responsive and community-based qualitative methodologies to examine social ties, pathways, access, and persistence for medical students of color; 2) exploring issues related to women, gender, and academic medicine; and 3) understanding the role of empathy and emotion in medical school socialization.
One notable project of Emiko’s research is her longitudinal study on women medical students, ongoing since Fall 2020. This research was initiated to explore the socialization experiences of women in medical school and has since offered insights into how social norms influence women medical students early in their education and ways women students exercise individual and communal agency to redress injustices. This work offers important insights into a group in medicine that, while numerically the majority, still face challenges in entering and succeeding in medicine. Emiko’s work on women in medicine illuminates these challenges and offers possibilities for tackling these structural barriers through enactment of agency of individuals, collective resistance, and communal support from leadership toward more gender-equitable spaces of learning and working.
