Dr. Tate is a sociologist and Research Director in the Section of Hospital Medicine at the University of Chicago studying decision-making. Her primary research objective is to investigate how doctor-patient relationships and the culture of medicine and medical education impact health outcomes. Her research centers on how social actors with different agendas and relationships, like doctors and patients, work together to make difficult decisions—such as those involving uncertain prognoses and end-of-life care. To do this, she brings together conversation analytic, ethnographic, causal inference, and natural language processing methods to study the complex machinery of how decisions are made and their impact on larger social issues such as health disparities, mortality, and relations with institutions. Dr. Tate also serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, and is an affiliate in the Department of Sociology and in the Center for Health and the Social Sciences at University of Chicago.