Tanya Stivers is a Professor of Sociology at UCLA. She is the Director of the Center for Language, Interaction, and Culture and the President of the International Society for Conversation Analysis. She has studied social interaction in clinical encounters with a focus on the way that patient interaction with physicians shapes diagnostic and treatment outcomes. Her research on everyday conversation has explored a range of aspects of response design
including timing of responses, who responds, and the design of the response. She is the author of Prescribing Under Pressure: Physician-Parent Conversations and Antibiotics and the co-editor of Person Reference in Interaction: Linguistic, Cultural, and Social Perspectives and The Morality of Knowledge in
Conversation.