People
David S. Jones, M.D., Ph.D.
Principal Investigator, Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology, and Medicine
Associate Professor of the History and Culture of Science and Technology, MIT
David Jones received an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and a Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard University in 2001. After completing his training as a psychiatrist in 2005, he joined the faculty at MIT. His past research has explored health disparities, especially with American Indians, as well as human subjects research and clinical trials. He is now beginning research projects on (1) the early history of pharmacogenetics and racial therapeutics, and (2) the history of cardiac revascularization. Contact: dsjones@mit.edu
Erica James, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, MIT
Erica Caple James received an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School (1995) and a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University (2003). Her research interests focus on medical and psychiatric anthropology, gender and violence, religion and healing, race, human rights, and the ethics and politics of democratization projects. Her doctoral research examined the psychosocial experience of Haitian torture survivors during the 1991-1994 coup period, as well as the politics of humanitarian assistance in post-conflict nations. She is beginning a history and ethnography of the immigrant and refugee Haitian community in Boston that focuses on racial disparities in health status and access to care, the way that psychosocial trauma manifests in the Haitian diaspora, and the challenges faces by Haitian health care providers in this setting. She is also developing a second project that evaluates the challenges faced by minority health professionals (researchers and providers) and graduate students training in health, science, and technology. At MIT she has also been actively involved in Institute initiatives for increasing faculty and student diversity. Contact: ejames@mit.edu
Ian Whitmarsh, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of California at San Francisco
Ian Whitmarsh received his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Princeton University (2005). His research explores tensions in the uses of biomedical categories linking race and disease among researchers, medical practitioners, government officials, and patients. He has conducted ethnographic research following a US-based asthma genetics study conducted in Barbados, exploring how the study is creating new regimes of care, state interventions, and unexpected biomedical diagnostics. He has also explored the significance of ambiguity in genetic discourses through research with families of children diagnosed with Klinefelter and Turner syndromes. His current work continues this focus on ethnicity, ambiguity, and genetics with projects in the Caribbean and the US on unanticipated genetic results and on the emerging biomedical category of the metabolic syndrome. His first book, Biomedical Ambiguity: Race, Asthma, and the Contested Meanings of Genetic Research in the Caribbean, was published in 2008.
Anne Pollock, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of of Literature, Communication, and Culture, Georgia Tech
Anne Pollock received her Ph.D. in History, Anthropology, and STS at MIT in 2007. Her research analyzed the ways in which pharmaceuticals have become racialized in America, focusing on thiazide, BiDil, and other treatments for heart disease. She is revising her dissertation, “Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference,” into a book manuscript.
Gregory Dorr, Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, Amherst College
Greg Dorr completed his Ph.D. in History at the University of Virginia in 2000. His scholarship has examined how Americans generally, and southerners in particular, have combined biological notions of race with scientific medicine to create and justify various cultures of segregation: black from white, male from female, rich from poor, able from disabled, fit from unfit, well from ill. His book, Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia, will be published in 2008. He was an assistant professor at the University of Alabama from 2000 to 2006.
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