Michael Yudell, PhD, MPH

Michael Yudell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Health and Prevention at the Drexel University School of Public. Yudell received his Ph.D in sociomedical sciences from Columbia University, an MPH from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, an M.Phil. from the City University of New York in 20th Century U.S. History, and a BA from Tufts University.

Dr. Yudell has also held the positions of researcher in the Molecular Laboratories at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where his work focused on genome policy and ethics, and the position of Health Policy Analyst at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, where he worked closely with the Institutes ethicist and deputy director on human genome project policy.

Dr. Yudell is the author with Rob DeSalle of Welcome to the Genome: A User's Guide to the Genetic Past, Present, and Future, published in September 2004 by John Wiley and Sons. Yudell and DeSalle also edited The Genomic Revolution: Unveiling The Unity Of Life, which was published in 2002 by the Joseph Henry Press of the National Academy of Science. His work has also been published in Nature Reviews Genetics, The Journal of the History of Biology, Genome Technology, Natural History, and American Scientist.

Research Interests: Public health ethics, public health genomics, and the history of public health. In general, Dr. Yudell's work seeks to document historically stigmatized populations, the challenges they face in public health and medicine, and how this history impacts contemporary health challenges. He is currently completing the book Making Race: Biology and the Evolution of the Race Concept in 20th Century American Thought, a history that examines the way in which biologists and geneticists shaped the race concept during the 20th century from eugenics to the sequencing of the human genome. The book pays careful attention to the ways in which scientific conceptions of human difference impact both public health and medicine. Additionally, the work has important implications for bioethics and public health ethics given race’s role in patient care and in our understandings of the health of populations. He is beginning work on a project that examines ethical issues associated with autism spectrum disorders, including risk communication and health disparities.

:: Curriculum Vitae (PDF) 

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