Seok Joo Youn is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, where she also earned a Master of Public Health (MPH) from the Brown School. Her doctoral training has been supported by the McDonnell International Scholars Academy, and her current research is supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Since 2019, she has worked as a certified hospice aide while conducting anthropological fieldwork, which forms the foundation of her doctoral research. Her work examines how aging, end-of-life care, and dying are organized within contemporary medical institutions, with particular attention to kinship, care ethics, and institutional governance. Drawing on ethnographic research in hospice and palliative care settings in South Korea, she analyzes how clinical practices, bureaucratic systems, and legal frameworks shape the management of dying and the recognition or exclusion of caregiving relationships.

Her MPH training provides a complementary population-level perspective, allowing her to bridge anthropological inquiry with public health concerns. She is particularly interested in how demographic aging, shifting family structures, and evolving medical systems reshape the social and ethical landscape of care for older adults.

Her Master’s research, Hospital Ethnography of Hospice and Palliative Care, funded by the National Research Foundation of Korea, examined how hospice teams construct alternative cultures of dying within hospital environments.

She received her M.A. in Anthropology from Seoul National University and her B.S. in Anthropology and Human Biology from Emory University, with a minor in Chinese Studies. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked at the Korean National Institute for Bioethics Policy and conducted research at the SNU laboratory of molecular pathogenesis of Alzheimer’s disease.