Professor Jennifer Dunn is a teacher, lawyer, and emerging scholar in sociology. Her research focuses on reproductive health, health equity, and social justice. Jennifer taught at UC Law SF from 2005 to 2019 before joining the UCSF School of Nursing as an Assistant Professor in Family Health Care Nursing.

Jennifer was the Law and Policy Advisor to UCSF ANSIRH and the Director of the Access through Primary Care Initiative (HWPP #171) from 2005-2009. In 2007, while working at ANSIRH, she partnered with the ACLU, UCSF Options Center, and Planned Parenthood to form the California Abortion Alliance (CAA). Jennifer served as CAA’s Director from 2010 to 2021.

Jennifer's current research into the genealogy of segregated pregnancy care is one of her most ambitious projects to date. She is undertaking a mixed-methods study to investigate the legal and political conditions that create and reproduce segregated pregnancy care and how clinicians experience providing care in these segregated systems. Through legal and archival research, she aims to trace how segregated health care was legally authorized through Jim Crow legislation; how de jure segregation continued through residential redlining and racialized occupational categories; and how de facto health care segregation was later reproduced through laws and health system financing so that segregated health care for low-income pregnant people and communities of color continued to be legalized and normalized in this country. Through interviews and ethnographic observation, she will explore how clinicians experience providing care in clinical spaces where pregnant patients enrolled in Medicaid are served in separate clinics, provided care under different protocols, or assigned different providers than privately insured patients.