Yale University | Program in the History of Medicine & Science

Having majored in History and Biology as an undergraduate and having pursued graduate training in Genetics and Religious Studies, Brian is most interested in studying historical encounters of science and religion in the twentieth century. More specifically, he is interested in the scientific and metaphysical controversies that played a part in the development of the life sciences. Currently, he is working on a dissertation dealing with neurophysiology and dualism. Among his other interests are The Scientific Revolution, History of the Life Sciences, and History of Medicine (especially History of Germ Theory and History of Psychology).

Helen Anne Curry
Harvard, B.A.

Helen is interested in the history of environmental science in America, particularly natural history and early ecology. She hopes this will justify any time spent attempting to be an amateur naturalist. Helen comes to New Haven most recently from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she worked for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' Program on Science and Global Security. She received a B.A. in History and Science from Harvard College in 2004.

Deborah Doroshow
Harvard-Radcliffe College, B.A.

Ziv joined Yale after earning a BA in history and political science fromTel Aviv University, and an MA in history from SUNY-Stony Brook. His dissertation, "The Whole Nine Months: a Cultural History of Pregnancy in Modern America," examines the interrelation of popular and medical perceptions of pregnancy, and the various ways in which they shaped prenatal practice. Broad areas of interest include the history of the US in the 20th century, the history of the body, health and the family, women's health, modern medicine, and consumerism. Ziv presented his work at the annual meetings of the Organization of American Historians (OAH), History of Science Society (HSS), and at the Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine.

Jed Gross
University of Pennsylvania, B.A; Yale, M.A.

Jed Adam Gross is a native of Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, whose manufacturing heritage has been immortalized in the Depression-era photographs of Walker Evans and mourned in Billy Joel's hit song "Allentown." For Jed, however, Eastern Pennsylvania's postindustrial flux provided a happy opportunity to expand his horizons intellectually. In 2002, he earned his B.A. in History and Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was inspired by teachers and mentors including Art Caplan, Ivar Berg, and Rosemary Stevens. A joint J.D.-Ph.D. student, Jed is currently Managing Editor of the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, & Ethics and has published work in the Quinnipiac Health Law Journal. His scholarly interests include the political economy of science and health policy (e.g., the funding of organ transplants and allocation of organs), scientific and medical evidence in the courtroom, how the common law responds to technological change, and research methods in the biomedical sciences.

Matt Gunterman
Murray State University, B.A.; University of Glasgow, M.Phil; Yale, M.A.

Matt Gunterman's research centers on issues of filth and faith in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His current project examines the influences of germ theory on religious practice among Protestants, Catholics and Jews. Topics of interest include the Christian communion ritual, use and design of communion and kiddush cups, evolving ideas of the sanitary and conceptual shifts in sanitary science, patent processes and litigation, religious schism, and commercial applications of germ theory.

Rana Hogarth
Yale, B.A; Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, M.H.S.

Rana grew up in sunny Los Angeles, but has lived on the East Coast since 1998 and has come to embrace her new home in spite of the existence of winter and snow. Rana earned her B.A. in History of Science, History of Medicine from Yale in 2002 and she received her M.H.S. in Health Policy from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2004. Rana came back to Yale after working in the "real world" as a health policy analyst for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (part of the Department of Health and Human Services) in Baltimore. Her academic interests include the role of medicine in shaping perceptions of race in ninteenth-century America; race, stigma and disease, and the use of race in public health campaigns and social policies.

When Rana is not pondering issues of race and medicine in America, she is probably watching Monty Python's Flying Circus or eating frites at Rudy's.

Julia Irwin
Oberlin College, B.A.; Yale, M.A.

A native of Lexington, Kentucky, Julia received a Bachelor of Arts in History from Oberlin College in May of 2004. Julia is interested in domestic and international U.S. history, particularly in the late 19th and early 20th century. Her academic interests also include the history of public health movements, infectious disease, and the role of medical and biological definitions of race and ethnicity in U.S. cultural and political history. In her dissertation, Julia plans to examine the American Red Cross during World War I and the 1920s. She will use the organization to explore the links between wartime reconstruction and public health initiatives abroad and the widespread interest in international philanthropic involvement at home. Julia hopes this project will shed light on the intersections between public health and disaster relief, U.S. foreign diplomacy and immigration policy, and American national self-definition in the Wilsonian age and beyond.

When she isn't in history mode, Julia loves to cook -- and to eat -- and plays IM softball with the History Department.

Alistair Kwan
MSc(Hons), DipSci, University of Auckland; MA(Hons) University of Melbourne; Yale M.Phil.

Alistair's interests range from Hellenic antiquity up to the Enlightenment, concentrated mostly on the physical world and Aristotelian theories about it. He is currently studying sites that accommodated the emergence of modern science from Tycho Brahe to Sir Hans Sloane. This project treats architecture as a primary source, includes scientific instrumentation, and includes some less studied sciences like alchemy, astrology, botany and music. It sits somewhere between history of science and history of architecture.

In spare moments, Alistair curates the medical and scientific instruments collection in the Medical Historical Library. He has been a Research Assistant at theYale Center for British Art, a Junior Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, a Research Fellow at the Beinecke Rare Books Library.

He teaches an undergraduate course in early modern scientific instrumentation, combining period mathematical theory with the study of historical artifacts and their critical replication.

Jung Lee
Yonsei University, B.S.; Iowa State University, M.A.

"It's too much fun," Jung says. While re-forming herself into a historian and relocating herself among historians, she hardly has had a dull moment. The dream-come-true of reading fun books all the time, after almost a decade of odd (?) jobs after college, is more fun than she expected. She is interested in fatigue and has been for about two years. Her wish is to examine the cultural and social contexts that made people exert their bodies and minds beyond a certain limit and the consequent efforts, primarily by scientific experts, to care for the pathologically or overly fatigued body. She hopes that comparing and contrasting the culture and science of different time periods regarding fatigue from the Gilded Age to the Post World War II era may render the task easier and make us appreciate uniqueness as well as similarities of each period. She likes to sniff in the wind though she neither barks nor walks on four limbs.

Mary Ellen Leuver
Yale, B.A.

Mary Ellen Leuver graduated from Yale College in 2006, earning her B.A. in History with minors in English and the Humanities. Having moved into the section of History of Science and Medicine for her doctorate, Mary Ellen now looks both ways before exploring the intersections of medicine, public health, and the American city. She is also fascinated by the dynamics of community formation, the history of political movements, and transnational discourses on disease.

Born in Virginia and raised in Colorado Springs, Mary Ellen spent a significant part of each year traveling internationally until she settled in New Haven. She is an aficionado of 1980s and 1990s action and comedy movies, and also devotes copious amounts of time and money to developing her encyclopedic knowledge of New Haven cuisine. In what little spare time she has, Mary Ellen enjoys recreational philosophy, biking, skiing, skydiving, and playing her clarinet.

Brendan Matz
Bowdoin College, B.A.

Brendan grew up in Springfield, MA (home of the Basketball Hall of Fame and the Dr. Seuss Memorial) and did his undergraduate work at Bowdoin College in Maine. After a few years investigating police misconduct in New York City and taking classes in the evening at Hunter College, he made the decision to pursue the history of medicine and science as a profession. His interests are broad and diverse, but Brendan sees himself concentrating on biology and medicine in 19th century Germany and America.

brendan.matz@yale.edu

Todd Olszewski
Washington University in St. Louis, B.A.; Yale, M.A.

A native of Galesburg, Illinois, Todd received an A.B. in History from Washington University in St. Louis (2002). His academic interests include medicine and health care in America, the intersections between science and medicine, and the development of biomedical technologies. His dissertation, "The Cholesterol Controversy: Atherosclerosis, Diet, and Health in Twentieth-Century America," examines scientific, technological, and social perceptions of cholesterol and its relation to heart disease. He is a co-chair of the Committee on Student Affairs for the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) and is also a member of the steering committee for the Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine. He plays the French horn in Yale's Saybrook College Orchestra, likes to golf when he can (he has one hole-in-one to his credit), and is an avid Fighting Illini sports fan.

todd.olszewski@yale.edu

Filip Oosterlinck
Catholic University of Louvain, Master of Engineering; Catholic University of Louvain, Bachelor's Degree equivalent; Catholic University of Louvain, Doctor of Engineering

filip.oosterlinck@yale.edu

Sage Ross
Oklahoma University, B.A.; Yale M.A.

Sage Ross is Sooner born and Sooner bred, having majored in chemistry at the University of Oklahoma. He moved to Connecticut in 2004 with his wife Faith, who is becoming a doctor, and his cats Tesla, Curie,and Halley, who are becoming fat. Although nominally studying history, he styles himself more as a 21st century natural philosopher. His academic interests include physics, chemistry, biology and the spaces in between, as well as science education, science fiction, science writing, and the relationship of science and religion. His favorite proteins are GroES and GroEL.

sage.ross@yale.edu

Maria Satterwhite
California Institute of Technology (Caltech), B.S.; Yale, M.A.

Maria received a Bachelor of Science degree from Caltech in Science, Ethics, and Society (History and Philosophy of Science) in 2002. Her academic interests include the history of psychiatry in pre-World War II America. She is also interested in interactions among health care providers and organizations, and the influences of gender, race, ethnicity, and class on psychiatric and other health care systems.

maria.satterwhite@yale.edu

Vreni Schoenenberger
Vanderbilt University, B.S.

vreni.schoenenberger@yale.edu

Paul Shin
Cornell University, B.A

I received an A.B. in Economics from Cornell (2004), and I am on leave from medical school (University of Rochester) to pursue my doctorate in history. My primary interest is in the intellectual and cultural grounding of medical practice in 19th c. America. Above all, I am interested in historical writing as craft (historians are writers, after all); to quote one historian, "Most of all, I wanted to tell a story." In my spare time, I enjoy reading (fiction and fiction), skiing, and playing squash. Any one interested in pursuing graduate work in the history of medicine/science should feel free to contact me with questions (especially 19th century Americanists or medical students thinking about pursuing the history of medicine/science).

paul.shin@yale.edu

Richard Sosa
Williams College, B.A.

richard.sosa@yale.edu

Heather Varughese
Stanford University, B.A.; University of Texas, M.D.

Heather is from Dallas, Texas, but has spent so much time in the Bay Area that she likes to claim California as home, too. She majored in Human Biology at Stanford University, went to medical school at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and completed an internship in internal medicine at Northwestern University. She is studying nineteenth-and twentieth-century American medicine, and is particularly interested in the intersection of medicine and religion in the history of leprosy. Other interests include the development of postgraduate medical education and the history of patient advocacy.

heather.varughese@yale.edu

Sakena Abedin
Harvard-Radcliffe College, B.A.; Stanford U., M.S.; Stanford U., M.A.

Crispin Barker
Cornell, B.A.; Yale, M.A.; Yale, M.S.; Yale, M.Phil

Justin Barr
Washington University, B.A.

Brian Casey
Loyola, B.A.; Loyola B.S.; Yale, M.A.; Yale M.S; Yale M.Phil.