Professor Jennifer Dunn is a teacher, lawyer, and emerging scholar in sociology. Her research focuses on reproductive health, health equity, health care reform, and social justice. Jennifer taught at UC Law SF from 2009 to 2019 before joining UCSF as an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing.

Jennifer was the Law and Policy Advisor to UCSF's Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) and the Director of the Access through Primary Care Initiative (HWPP #171) from 2005-2009. In 2007, she partnered with the ACLU, UCSF Options Center, and Planned Parenthood to form the California Abortion Alliance (CAA), a network of physicians, advanced practice clinicians, lawyers, researchers, and advocates who work to protect access to safe and legal abortion. 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 taking an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the legal and political conditions that create and reproduce economic and racial segregation in pregnancy care and how health care providers experience providing care and training in segregated systems. Through legal and archival research, she will trace how segregated health care was legally authorized through Jim Crow legislation; how de jure segregation continued through residential redlining, union exclusions, and racialized occupational categories; and how segregation in our health system was reinforced and legitimized through health policy decisions made concurrently with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Through interviews and ethnographic observation, she will explore how clinicians and trainees experience providing care in clinical spaces where pregnant patients enrolled in Medicaid are served in separate clinics, provided care under different protocols, and assigned different providers than privately insured patients.