Robert Aronowitz

Robert Aronowitz is Professor and Chair, History and Sociology of Science, at the University of Pennsylvania. He studied linguistics at Berkeley before receiving his MD from Yale.  At Penn, Aronowitz was the founding director of the Health and Societies Program and co-director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars Program.  Aronowitz is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and a recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Russell Sage Foundation, Davis Center for Historical Studies (Princeton), and the Charles E. Culpeper Foundation. He is the author of Making Sense of Illness: Science, Society, and Disease (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Unnatural History: Breast Cancer and American Society (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Risky Medicine: Our Quest to Cure Fear & Uncertainty (Chicago University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Three Shots at Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine's Simple Solutions (Hopkins, 2010), and has published widely on the history of disease, epidemiology, public health, and risk.  Aronowitz is currently interested in the ways that the increasing intensity, number, and novel combinations of medical interventions have undermined the straightforward translation of insights from clinical and laboratory experiments to the care of individuals.