About
Liz Chiarello is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. She is a medical sociologist and socio-legal scholar who conducts research at the intersection of healthcare and law. Her research centers on the mechanisms by which boundaries between healthcare and criminal justice blur, especially how cultural forces such as law, politics, technology, and organizational policy change frontline work at the medico-legal borderland.
Professor Chiarello spent a decade studying the U.S. overdose crisis that culminated in her award-winning first book Policing Patients: Treatment and Surveillance on the Frontlines of the Opioid Crisis published by Princeton University Press in 2024. Policing Patients won several awards including the Herbert Jacob Prize from the Law and Society Association, the Donald Light Book Award from the American Sociological Association, and the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Book Prize from the British Sociological Association.
Professor Chiarello has been a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and a Trustee of the Law and Society Association. Her work has appeared in sociology and socio-legal journals such as the American Sociological Review, the Annual Review of Sociology, Social Science & Medicine, and Law & Social Inquiry. Her research received support from a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and her work has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, and Bloomberg News.
Updated April 24, 2026
***NOTE: New E-mail Address: chiarello@wustl.edu***
