Biomedicine and Race

Senior Health Writer, WHYY
Moderator, Biomedicine and Race

Taunya English is a senior writer for “The Pulse,” WHYY’s weekly radio show on health, science and innovation. In recent years, she’s covered the influence of neighborhoods, social policy and economics on wellbeing. Before joining WHYY, Taunya worked for the public radio station in Baltimore and as a science writer in Washington, D.C. She holds a masters degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Select Resources

• Designs on Health: How Neighborhood Influences Health and the Power of Place

• In the Gap: Voices from the Health Divide

Classes

• Class 2: Biomedicine and Race

Annenberg Professor of Natural Sciences and Director of the Center for Neuroscience & Society, University of Pennsylvania

Farah is a cognitive neuroscientist who works on problems at the interface of neuroscience and society. Her areas of interest include the effects of socioeconomic adversity on children’s brain development and emerging ethical, legal and social issues in neuroscience (“neuroethics”). She also teaches, advises graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and directs the Center for Neuroscience & Society and the SCAN graduate certificate program.

Select Resources

• Socioeconomic Status and Brain

• Neuroethics: Ethical, legal, and social implications of neuroscience

Classes

• Class 2: Biomedicine and Race

Richard Perry University Professor, Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) Professor, Dean of the School of Social Policy & Practice, University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Jackson’s research examines racial and class-based differences in contemporary urban environments, including a focus on how urbanites themselves theorize and deploy those differences in everyday interactions. He uses ethnographic research methods to extend and expand Critical Race Theory as an analytical and explanatory framework for understanding contemporary social conflicts. He examines how contemporary urban religions are being mobilized to improve health literacy and health outcomes in poor and underserved communities in Philadelphia and around the world. Dr. Jackson’s also explores how film and other non-traditional or multi-modal formats can be most effectively utilized in scholarly research projects, as a founding member of CAMRA and PIVPE, two Penn-based initiatives organized around creating visual and performative research projects—and producing rigorous criteria for assessing them.

Classes

• Class 2: Biomedicine and Race

Faculty of Medicine, Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, McGill Centre on Population Dynamics, McGill University
Visiting Professor (2015), Penn Programs on Race, Science, and Society, University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Kaufman’s work focuses on social epidemiology, analytic methodology, causal inference and on a variety of health outcomes including perinatal outcomes and cardiovascular, psychiatric and infectious diseases.  He is an editor at the journal “Epidemiology” and an associate editor at “American Journal of Epidemiology”.  With J. Michael Oakes he is the co-editor of the textbook “Methods in Social Epidemiology”.  He has over 200 publications in peer-reviewed journals.

Classes

• Class 2: Biomedicine and Race

George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology
Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights 
Director, Program on Race, Science and Society

An acclaimed scholar of race, gender and the law, Roberts joined the University of Pennsylvania as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and the Law School where she also holds the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mosell Alexander chair. Her pathbreaking work in law and public policy focuses on urgent contemporary issues in health, social justice, and bioethics, especially as they impact the lives of women, children and African-Americans. She is the author of more than 100 scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as a co-editor of six books on such topics as constitutional law and women and the law.

Select Resources

• TedMed: The Problem with Race-Based Medicine [video]

• What's Wrong with Race-Based Medicine?: Genes, Drugs, and Health Disparities (2011) [pdf]

• Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century (New Press, 2011) [for purchase]

• Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Pantheon, 1997) [for purchase]

Classes

• Class 2: Biomedicine and Race

Professor and Chair, Department of Anthropology , Princeton University

Rouse is a cultural anthropologist who focuses on how evidence and authority are used to validate truth claims and calls for social justice. Grounding her work is her interest in racialization or how race is understood, categorized, and made real within the domains of religion, medicine, development, and education. Her work in medicine explores how statistical evidence is used to make claims about health care and social justice. She focuses on uncertainties around what constitutes a racial health disparity, and the evidence-based research used to assert particular narratives of injustice and calls for reparations.

Select Resources

• Uncertain Suffering: Racial Health Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease (2009) [for purchase]

Classes

• Class 2: Biomedicine and Race