Carolyn Dever, Ph.D.

Carolyn Dever holds a B.A. from Boston College and a Ph.D. in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University. Dever is currently the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Vanderbilt University and teaches courses in English and Women’s and Gender Studies. She is the author of Death and the Mother From Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of origin (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Skeptical Feminisms: Activist Theory, Activist Practice (Minnesota, 2004) and is currently involved in research on late- Victorian poetry and will culminate in a book about intimacy, domesticity, and art in Britain at the turn of the 20th century.

Emilie Townes, Ph.D.

Emilie Townes holds a Doctor of Ministry degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School and a Ph.D. in Religion in Society and personality from Northwestern University. She is currently the Dean of Vanderbilt’s Divinity school. She is the past president of the American Academy of Religion and is a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She currently serves as the president of the Society for the Study of Black Religion (2012–16). Her research is focused on Christian ethics, womanist ethics, critical social theory, cultural theory and studies, and postmodernism and social postmodernism. Townes is the author of Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope (Scholars Press, 1993), In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness (Abingdon Press, 1995), and her most recent book: Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2006).

Jesse Ehrenfeld, MD, MPH

Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld graduated from University of Chicago, Pritzker School of Medicine. He is an Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and is the co-leader of the LGBTI Health Program at Vanderbilt. Ehrenfeld serves as Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Anesthesia. He is Director of the Perioperative Data Systems Research Group and Medical Director for Perioperative Quality. Ehrenfeld is a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy Reserves and Speaker of the Massachusetts Medical Society. Dr. Ehrenfeld is involved with research that focuses on understanding how information technology can improve surgical safety, and has co-authored seven textbooks and numerous peer-reviewed scientific articles on the topic of his research.

Sue Siegel

Siegel received her B.A. in Biology from the University of Puerto Rico and a Master’s Degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Boston University. Siegel is currently a GE Corporate Officer and the CEO of healthyimagination. Siegel is an industry leader in growing companies that specialize in biomedical and healthcare technology. Siegel is a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute and serves on multiple advisory boards, including the President’s Circle of the National Academies, the Advisory Council of The Gladstone Institutes, a preeminent biomedical research organization at the University of California, San Francisco, and the Stanford University Medical School Institute for Immunity, Transplantation, and Infectious Diseases.

Aimi Hamraie, Ph.D.

Dr. Hamraie received her Ph.D. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University. Hamraie held fellowships with the Social Science Research Council, the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History. Her academia specialties are Critical Disability Studies, Science & Technology Studies, Architectural and Urban Studies, Contemporary feminist theories of science, the body, and design. Her dissertation topic was “Bodies as Evidence in Disability-Accessible Design.” Starting fall 2013 Hamaraie will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University.

Wayne Riley, MD, MPH, MBA, MACP

Dr. Riley received the B.A. degree in Anthropology from Yale University, the M.P.H. in Health Systems Management from the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, the Doctor of Medicine degree from the Morehouse School of Medicine and the MBA from Rice University’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business. Riley is the President and CEO of Meharry Medical College in addition to being a professor of Internal Medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Dr. Riley serves as a member and holds leadership roles in a number of leading organizations and high level federal advisory panels including the Association of Academic Health Centers, U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs National Academic Affiliations Council and the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) “Blue Ribbon” Advisory Committee. He currently chairs the National Advisory Council on Minority Health and Health Disparities of the NIH. Riley is also corporate director of HCA Holdings, Inc., Pinnacle Financial Partners, LLC and Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

JuLeigh Petty, Ph.D.

Petty earned her Ph.D. from Northwestern University. She is currently the Assistant Director and Senior Lecturer for the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University. Petty co-authored the article “Bureaucratic Ethics: IRBs and the Legal Regulation of Human Subjects Research” which was published in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science Journal.

Derek Griffith, Ph.D.

Griffith holds a Ph.D. from DePaul University in Clinical-Community Psychology and completed his postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an associate professor for the Medicine, Health, and Society Department and for the School of Medicine at Vanderbilt University. He is the director of the Institute for Research on Men’s Heath, a member of the Cancer Epidemiology, Prevention & Control Research Program, and a member of the Community engaged Research Core. Griffith was the former director of the Center on Men’s Health Disparities and assistant director of the Center for Research on Ethnicity, Culture, and Health at the University of Michigan. His research on men’s health examines the health paradox of men having higher salaries and more resources but shorter life expectancies.

Kitt Carpenter, Ph.D.

Carpenter holds a Ph.D. from the University of California-Berkeley and was a Robert Wood Johnson Postdoctoral Scholar in Health Policy at the University of Michigan. Carpenter will join the Department of Economics at Vanderbilt University at the start of the 2013-14 academic year following his position as faculty member at the Merage School of the University of California- Irvine. His research is in the area of health economics examining the effects of several types of public policies on workplace outcomes and health behaviors, as well as the role of sexual orientation in determining labor market outcomes. Dr. Carpenter’s research has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals.

 

Jonathan Metzl, MD, Ph.D.

Jonathan Metzl, Frederick B. Rentschler II Chair of Sociology and Medicine, Health, and Society, holds a B.A. in English literature and biology and an M.D. in medicine from the University of Missouri, an M.A. in poetry from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Michigan. Dr. Metzl’s work examines the nexus of race, gender, politics and stigma in American medicine, with a particular focus on psychiatry. Metzl is currently the Director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University. He is a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and has written two books: Prozac on the Couch and Difference and Identity in Medicine.

Arleen Tuchman, Ph.D.

Dr. Tuchman holds a Ph.D. in History of Science and Medicine from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Tuchman specializes in the history of science and medicine in the United States and Europe and teaches courses on this topic at Vanderbilt University. Her research interests include the cultural history of health and disease, the rise of scientific medicine, and scientific and medical constructions of gender and sexuality. Tuchman has authored two books Science, Medicine, and the State in Germany (Oxford University Press, 1993), and Science Has No Sex: The Life of Marie Zakrzewska, M.D. (The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), and is currently working on writing a cultural history of type 2 diabetes in the United States.

Christopher Coleman, J.D.

Mr. Coleman received his bachelor degree from Vanderbilt University and holds a master’s in English Literatures from University of Virginia and a master’s in history from Northwestern. He received his degree in Law from Northwestern and was associate editor of the Northwestern University Law Review. Coleman has served on the Board of Directors of the Young Lawyers’ Division of the Nashville Bar Association and was the president of the Nashville Chapter of the American Constitution Society. He is co-author of Social Movements and Social Change Litigation: Synergy in the Montgomery Bus Protest and was published in Law & Social Inquiry in 2005.

Milton Curry, Ph.D.

Milton Curry holds degrees from Harvard Graduate School of Design and Cornell University. Dr. Curry has taught architecture at University of Michigan, Cornell, Harvard, and Arizona State University; and was director of the Cornell Council for the Arts from 2002-2008. He is founding editor of CriticalProductive, principal of OrbitMCA designstudio; and associate dean at University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He authored the essay in Where are the Utopian Visionaries (Periscope Press, 2012) and two essays for The Huffington Post: “What Obama can learn from Brazil” (2011) and “Nixon in China and the American City” (2011). Curry’s current work is a manuscript that presents urbanization in the aftermath of postwar Modernist development in the United States and South / Latin America as a phenomena linked to the unique quest for social freedom, and the role of racial theory in the constructed identities of Americans.

Jay Clayton, Ph.D.

Clayton received his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from University of Virginia. He is a professor at Vanderbilt University, the Director of the Curb Center, and was the former English Department chair. His research includes arts and public policy, Victorian literature, genetics and literature digital technology and online narrative, and contemporary fiction. Clayton is an award winning author of three books and numerous academic articles. His book Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (Oxford University Press, 2003), was awarded the Suzanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship.

Monique Lyle, Ph.D.

Lyle holds a Ph.D. in political science from Duke University. She is currently an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University in the Political Science Department. Lyle has published articles in the Journal of Politics and the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences. Her primary research interests are in political psychology and race and ethnicity in American politics. She is particularly interested in how American institutions and elites shape the psychological development and make-up of American citizens. Dr. Lyle was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at University of Michigan from 2008-2010, where she worked on health-related research, including a project examining the role of politics in the stigmatization of mental illness.

Hector Myers, Ph.D

Myers holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Health Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles. He was a professor at UCLA in the field of Health Psychology, but he will be joining the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University as a Professor for the 2013-14 academic year. His research focuses on the role of psychosocial stress and the impact on physical and psychological health and wellbeing in African Americans and other minority populations. Myers has published over fifty papers on this topic in peer-reviewed journals.

Dominique Béhague, Ph.D.

Béhague holds degrees from King’s College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical medicine. She is a trained social anthropologist and specializes in the ethnography of Brazil and the anthropology of medicine and bioscience, as these relate to psychiatry, reproductive health and the politics of global health research. Béhague is an associate professor of medicine, health, and society and has published sixteen papers to date.

Amy Non, Ph.D.

Dr. Non holds a MA in in public health and a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Florida and was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation fellow at Harvard University. She is an assistant professor at the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society and in the anthropology department of Vanderbilt University. Non’s research studies the effects that genetic ancestry, environment, and behavior affect the expression of genes. Her work integrates genetics, anthropology and public health. Non is currently a part of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project. She aims to understand how early life exposure to stress alters the epigenome through the process of epigenetics. Dr. Non has published numerous articles about her current and past research.

 

Laura Stark, Ph.D.

Dr. Stark holds a B.S. with honors from Cornell and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University. She completed her Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University and then became a Stetten Fellow at the National Institute of Health. Stark is currently at Vanderbilt University as an Assistant Professor in the Center for Medicine, Health and Society, affiliated faculty with the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society, and affiliated with the Department of History. Her research examines research subjects enrolled in the first clinical trials in the US National Institutes of Health. Stark is the author of the book Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research (The University of Chicago Press, 2012), and numerous articles and chapters. Stark is currently working on her second book, The Life of The Clinic, which is a collection of the oral history of former health research participants.

Jeff Balser, MD, Ph.D.

Dr. Balser holds a B.A. from Tulane University, a MD/Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University, and completed his residency in anesthesiology and fellowship in critical care at Johns Hopkins. As a physician, Balser has focused on the postoperative care of cardiac surgery patients in the ICU. He is currently the eleventh Dean of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs, and oversees all health-related programs at Vanderbilt. Under his leadership, Vanderbilt’s clinical services supporting surgery and intensive care medicine have grown by 25%. Additionally, he is a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, the Association of American Physicians, has chaired the NIH Director’s Pioneer Awards Committee, and is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

Melinda Buntin, Ph.D.

Dr. Buntin has an A.B. from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and a Ph.D. in Health Policy with a concentration in economics from Harvard. Buntin is the Deputy Assistant Director at Congressional Budget Office and was previously deputy director of RAND Health’s Economics, Financing, and Organization Program, director of Public Sector Initiatives for RAND Health, and co-director of the Bing Center for Health Economics. Her research has focused on insurance benefit design, health insurance markets, provider payment, and the care use and needs of the elderly.

Susan Cahn, Ph.D.

Susan Cahn received her B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz and her Ph.D. from Minnesota. Cahn is a U.S. History professor at the University of Buffalo and her classes and research focuses on gender, culture, and society in the United States. Cahn is a well-published author; her monograph Coming on Strong: gender and Sexuality in Twentieth Century Sports (1994) won the Best Book Award in the Sport History category from the North American Society of Sports History. Dr. Cahn is working to complete her book manuscript, “Sexual Reckonings: Adolescent Girlhood in the Modern South”.

Khalil Muhammad, Ph.D.

Muhammad holds a Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University. He is an author, director, and scholar on African-American history. He is the executive director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black culture since 2011. Muhammad’s book, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and Making of Modern America, (Harvard University Press, 2010) was awarded the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize.

Priscilla Wald, Ph.D.

Wald holds a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and a B.A. in English from Yale University. She is a professor of English and Women’s Studies at Duke University. Although she is an English Professor, Wald’s interest and research crosses over into health, science, and medicine, in addition to, American Literature, race, gender, and sexuality. Wald is the author of two books: Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Duke University Press, 2008) and Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (Duke UP, 1995). She is working on another book: Cultures and Carriers: From Typhoid Mary to African Even and a collection of essays: Clones, Chimeras and Other Creatures of the Biological Revolution: Essays on Genetics and Popular Culture.

Ken MacLeish, Ph.D.

MacLeish holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin and completed postdoctoral training in mental health Services Research at the Institute for Health at Rutgers University. He is a faculty member of Vanderbilt University’s Department of Medicine, Health, and Society. MacLeish’s research examines the impacts of the Iraq War and military institutions on the everyday lives of American soldiers and military families. He has written a book, Making War at Fort Hood: Life and Uncertainty in a Military Community (Princeton University Press, 2013) on the subject.

Lindsey Andrews

Andrews completed her Ph.D. at Duke University in Women’s Studies and she has a BA, English from the University of Southern California. Her dissertation was “American Experiments: Science, Aesthetics, and Politics in Clinical Practices of American Literature”. Andrews will be joining the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University for the 2013-14 academic year as a lecturer.

Sten Vermund, M.D., Ph.D.

Vermund holds a medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, a M.Phil. and a Ph.D. in Epidemiology from Columbia University. He completed his Pediatric internship, residency, and fellowship in Epidemiology at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Vermund has served as chief of the epidemiology branch of the AIDS division of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and is the U.S. chair of the U.S.-Japan Panel on AIDS. He is the recipient of the Public Health Service’s Superior Service Award and the NIAID/NIH/PHS Meritorious Service Award, among numerous other honors. He is currently the Director of the Institute for Global Health and a professor at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Vermund’s research interests focus on infectious disease control and prevention with a concentration on developing countries and underserved areas of the southeastern U.S.