Alexandra Minna Stern

Alexandra Minna Stern, Ph.D., "is the Zina Pitcher Collegiate Professor in the History of Medicine, Associate Director of the Center for the History of Medicine, and Associate Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, History, and American Culture at the University of Michigan.

"Her book Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, (University of California Press, 2005) won the 2006 American Public Health Association’s Arthur Viseltear Prize for outstanding contribution to the scholarship on the history of public health. Her article “We Can Not Make a Silk Purse out of a Sow’s Ear: Eugenics in the Hoosier Heartland, 1900-1960,” won the Emma Thornbrough Prize for the best article in the Indiana Magazine of History in 2007. She is a prolific author on wide-ranging topics in the history of medicine, including tropical medicine, eugenics, medical genetics, epidemics, and children’s health.

"In 2008, she and Dr. Howard Markel were awarded a Robert Wood Johnson Investigator Award in Health Policy Research to conduct a study of the qualitative dimensions of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic in 50 U.S. cities. This complements a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention contract, for which she is Co-PI, focused on extensive research of the 1918-1919 experience and assessment of how the past can inform pandemic preparedness planning today.

"Dr. Stern is also engaged in a study of the history of genetic counseling, which follows the field over dramatic transformations from the 1940s to 1980s. This project was funded by a National Institutes of Health-National Library of Medicine Publication Grant and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. She recently completed work, as Co-PI, on a National Institutes of Health-Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of the Human Genome Project Grant, on a collaborative project focused on the history and legacy of Indiana’s 1907 eugenic sterilization act, the first such legislation in the world.

"In addition to her research, Dr. Stern teaches courses in the history of science and medicine and advises many graduate students on dissertation projects in the social sciences and humanities."