Biographies

• 
  Evelynn Hammonds

  Professor Hammonds is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and Professor of African and African American Studies and current chair of the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. She was the first Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity at Harvard University (2005–08).  From 2008–13 she served as Dean of Harvard College. She holds honorary degrees from Spelman College and Bates College.

  Professor Hammonds’ areas of research include the histories of science, medicine, and public health in the United States; race and gender in science studies; feminist theory and African American history She has published articles on the history of disease, race and science, African American feminism, African-American women and the epidemic of HIV/AIDS and analyses of gender and race in science and medicine. Professor Hammonds’ current work focuses on the intersection of scientific, medical and socio-political concepts of race in the United States.  She holds undergraduate degrees in physics from Spelman College, electrical engineering from Ga. Tech and an SM in Physics from MIT. She earned her PhD from Harvard University. She served as a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer (2003–05), a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a Visiting Professor at UCLA and at Hampshire College.  

  Professor Hammonds was named a Fellow of the Association of Women in Science (AWIS) in 2008.  She served on the Board of Trustees of Spelman College and currently on the Board of the Arcus Foundation, and the Board of Trustees of Bates College. In 2010 she was appointed to President Barack Obama’s Board of Advisers on Historically Black Colleges and Universities and in 2014 to the President’s Advisory Committee on Excellence in Higher Education for African Americans. She served as a member of the Committee on Equal Opportunity in Science and Engineering (CEOSE), the congressionally mandated oversight committee of the National Science Foundation, the Advisory Committee of the EHR directorate of the NSF, and the Advisory Committee on the Merit Review Process of the National Science Foundation. In 2017 she was appointed to the Committee on Women in Science, Engineering and Medicine (CWSEM) of the National Academies. She is currently director of the Project on Race & Gender in Science & Medicine at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard. In 2018, Prof. Hammonds was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM).

• 
  Dóra Vargha

  Dóra Vargha is Senior Lecturer based at the Department of History and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. She is co-editor of the journal Social History of Medicine. Her work spans from the politics of epidemic management to public health systems and access to therapeutics. She has written on the global infrastructure of diphtheria antitoxin, the politics of vaccination in the Cold War, hospital care of disabled children in communist contexts and about shifting epidemic narratives in historical analysis. Her monograph, Polio Across the Iron Curtain: Hungary's Cold War with an Epidemic (2018) received the biannual book prize of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health.  Vargha has recently been working on a project titled After the End of Disease. Placing epidemic narratives in focus, this research is an interdisciplinary collaboration to think past the conventional narrative and neat epidemic bell-curves to identify, collect, and disseminate different understandings of disease impacts. With funding from the European Research Council and the Wellcome Trust, she is now embarking on a new research project, Socialist Medicine, which explores global health histories from the socialist world’s perspective.

  Photo: Oscar Vargha Rangel de Almeida.