Graduate Students

Sakena Abedin
Harvard College, B.A.; Stanford University, M.A.; Washington University, M.D.
Sakena grew up in El Paso, TX, but has since lived on both coasts and in the midwest.  After finishing medical school, she completed a residency in pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and spent two years as a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at Yale, where she began work on an ethnographic study of teaching and learning in a clinic staffed by pediatric residents.  Sakena is interested in studying physicians' representations of the doctor-patient relationship, and how they reflect ideas about medical care and practice.  She is also interested in the history of U.S. healthcare policy, particularly initiatives meant to improve the quality and equity of the healthcare system. 
sakena.abedin@yale.edu

Justin Barr
Washington University, B.A.
Raised in Virginia Beach, Virginia, Justin graduated from Washington University in 2006 with an A.B. in History. After spending a summer teaching English in Hanoi, he worked for the US government for a year writing the history of the Special Forces medic and examining its links to physician assistant programs. This project corresponds to Justin's more general interest in military medical history and its ties to civilian medicine. Also a student at the University of Virginia's medical school, Justin plans to pursue a career that interdigitates his passion for medicine and history.
justin.barr@yale.edu

Mary Brazelton
Harvard, B.A.
mary.brazelton@yale.edu

Jessica Cecilia Cardenas-Navia
Yale, B.A.
Cecilia has deferred matriculation in 2006 in order to pursue a M.A. degree in History of Science at Cambridge University. She will join us in the 2007-2008 academic year.
jessica.cardenas-navia@yale.edu

Brian Casey
Loyola, B.A.; Loyola B.S.; Yale, M.A.; Yale M.S; Yale M.Phil.
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).
brian.casey@yale.edu

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.
helen.curry@yale.edu

Deborah Doroshow
Harvard-Radcliffe College, B.A.
Debbie hails from sunny Los Angeles, but has spent the last 7 years in Boston, where she was an undergraduate concentrator in History and Science and a medical student, both at Harvard.  She couldn't decide whether to do science or humanities in college and picked the one major that encompassed them both, a decision that worked out so well that she is now planning to both practice medicine and be a historian.  How that will be executed remains an enticing mystery.  She is interested in the history of psychiatry and medicine in 20th century America, particularly notions of therapeutic efficacy, and especially loves doing oral histories with old retired psychiatrists.  In her free time, you can find her singing alto in The Citations, Yale's graduate a capella group. 
deborah.doroshow@yale.edu

Ziv Eisenberg
Tel Aviv University, B.A; SUNY-Stony Brook, M.A; Yale University, M.A.
Ziv joined Yale after earning a BA in history and political science from Tel 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.
ziv.eisenberg@yale.edu

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.
jed.gross@yale.edu

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.
matthew.gunterman@yale.edu

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.
rana.hogarth@yale.edu

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.
julia.f.irwin@yale.edu

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.
alistair.kwan@yale.edu

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.
jung.k.lee@yale.edu

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.
maryellen.leuver@yale.edu

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

Joy Rankin
Dartmouth College, B.A.; Duke University, M.A.
After growing up just down the Connecticut coast from Yale, Joy is delighted to be pursuing her doctorate here, and her focus in the History of Science and Medicine is a natural culmination of her secondary studies.  She attended Dartmouth College, where she double-majored in mathematics and history.  Her history senior project analyzed Thomas Power's thesis in his book Heisenberg's War that physicist Werner Heisenberg actively sabotaged the Nazi efforts to develop an atomic bomb during World War II.  After college, Joy enjoyed a successful career launching educational programs ranging from an online ESL website to online Advanced Placement courses for high school students, a career that brought her from Boston to Portland, Oregon to Durham, North Carolina.  Most recently, Joy launched Duke University's doctoral program in Public Policy while attaining her master's degree there.  At Duke, Joy investigated the social history of the community at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, as well as the development of open source biology.  Her master's thesis employed three documentary works about J. Robert Oppenheimer - a play, a film, and an opera - to examine American attitudes about living in the Atomic Age.  At Yale, Joy plans to research American advances in the biological sciences since 1950.  She is interested in the processes by which the life sciences have become increasingly computer-oriented, and the effects of that technological transition on the organizational culture of biology.  She seeks an understanding of the exchange between the physical and biological sciences, especially parallels between the Cold-War-era rise of “big physics” and the recent rise of “big biology.”  When she's not brainstorming ideas for articles and papers, Joy loves spending time with her husband, Scott, traveling, making jewelry, and enjoying the performing arts, especially dance and theater.
joy.rankin@yale.edu

Thomas Reznick
Colby College, B.A.
thomas.reznick@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

Robin Scheffler
University of Chicago, B.A.
Robin Wolfe Scheffler has undergraduate degrees in History and Chemistry from the University of Chicago and an MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge.  His general area of interest is the history of the 20th century (especially interwar) American biological sciences, with an emphasis on the intellectual, institutional, and cultural processes through which a previously scattered series of fields became a (relatively) coherent whole.  He has also worked extensively on the history of interwar science in England, especially at Cambridge.  His work aims to foster an ongoing dialog between the History of Science and Cultural and Intellectual History.
robin.scheffler@yale.edu          

Vreni Schoenenberger
Vanderbilt University, B.S.
Originally from Western New York, Vreni has spent much of her life bouncing around warmer locales before landing once again in the Frozen North. She received a B.S. in Bioethics from Vanderbilt University, where she was an Ingram Scholar. As a result of the field work opportunities the latter provided, she developed a keen interest in the interplay between secretariat-mediated international health NGOs and the localized experience of such work, particularly within the framework of global bioethics. After leaving Vanderbilt, Vreni worked for the National Library of Medicine at the National Institute of Health before arriving at Yale. Her research focus remains cemented in the global context, with a proposed dissertation focusing on the historical relationship between United Nations agencies and the nutrition industry. Vreni plans to pursue a career in the international health sector upon completion of her PhD, as she is simultaneously working towards a secondary degree in global health.
vreni.schoenenberger@yale.edu

Paul Shin
Cornell University, B.A
Originally born in Calgary, Alberta, and having spent most of my life (living and being schooled) in upstate New York, I've always grown up in cold weather and snow--which explains why fall and winter are my favorite seasons. My academic interests have been diverse; I received an A.B. in Economics from Cornell (2004), recently began medical school (University of Rochester, Rochester, NY), and have intermittantly worked in medical laboratories in an attempt to fashion myself into a scientist (though my advisors would think unsuccessfully). It was in medical lecture halls filled with powerpoints of electrophysiology, endocrinology, map kinases (and map kinase kinases) that I became interested (as an historian) and uneasy (as a medical student) about the relation between science and medicine; more fundamentally, what science is and how one characterizes the process of producing natural knowledge. I am currently on ! leave from medical school to pursue a doctorate in the history of medicine and hope to explore science and authority in 19th century American medicine from multiple perspectives. I intend to finish medical school and with some luck, practice both medicine and history. Some current historical interests include public perceptions of medicine, medical pluralism and competition, and pharmaceutical advertisements (e.g. patent medicine). Outside of academia I enjoy reading (fiction and non-fiction), trying to become an amateur birder (with mixed results), and sports (squash, skiing, and cycling). I welcome any students interested in pursuing graduate work in the history of medicine/science to contact me with questions, especially 19th century Americanists or any medical students who are thinking about pursuing history of medicine: the transition from medical school to graduate school has been rewarding but also complicated.
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