Dr. Tate is a sociologist and Research Director in the Section of Hospital Medicine at the University of Chicago studying decision-making. Her research centers on how social actors with different agendas and relationships work together to make difficult decisions. She is particularly focused on doctor-patient interactions and relationships, and how these impact decisions about care near the end of life. 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. She has presented her work at the American Sociological Association, the National Communication Association, and the International Conference on Conversation Analysis, among others.