Sarah Richardson

Lab Director (She/they)

Sarah S. Richardson is the Aramont Professor of the History of Science and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University and directs the Harvard GenderSci Lab. A historian and philosopher of science, Richardson is a leading scholar of gender and science whose work argues for conceptual rigor and social responsibility in scientific research on sex, gender, sexuality, and reproduction. Richardson serves on the Standing Committees for Degrees in Social Studies and for the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Interfaculty Initiative at Harvard.

Richardson is the author of The Maternal Imprint: The Contested Science of Maternal-Fetal Effects and Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome. She has published two edited volumes, Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age and Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology After the Genome, articles in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, BioSocieties, the Hastings Report, and Biology and Philosophy, and commentaries in Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of Neuroscience. Her work has also appeared in popular forums such as Slate, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe.

Richardson's research has been supported by the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Association of University Women. She has served on the Governing Board of the International Association for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology and is a member of the editorial boards of Signs and Bulletin of the History of Medicine.

You can contact her at srichard@fas.harvard.edu

Marion Boulicault

Director of Interdisciplinary Research & Community (she/her)

Marion Boulicault is a feminist philosopher of science, and is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar in Ethics & Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her research analyzes the socio-political dimensions of scientific measurement practices. She has a PhD in Philosophy from MIT, and an MPhil in the History & Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge.

As Director of Interdisciplinary Research & Community at the Harvard GenderSci Lab, Marion explores and theorizes the opportunities, challenges and conceptual questions that arise when working across disciplines. In collaboration with the other Lab Directors, she leads research projects that integrate multiple skill sets, backgrounds and perspectives. Her role also involves a vigorous commitment to mentorship, public outreach and cross-institutional collaboration. Together with lab colleagues, Marion's work has been published in journals including Nature, Human Fertility and Psychological Science, as well as in public media venues, such as Slate and The Guardian.

Kelsey Ichikawa

Lab Manager (she/her)

Kelsey is excited to serve as the GenderSci Lab Manager. She graduated from Harvard in 2020 with an A.B. summa cum laude in Neurobiology and Philosophy. She has conducted research in science and technology studies, social and systems neuroscience, and moral philosophy. In GSL, she helps project manage research streams, support grant writing and funding endeavors, and provide the organizational structure that supports the lab’s multi-disciplinary, radically collaborative processes.

In other parts of her life, she has been involved in grassroots organizing and political education. When she’s not working, you can catch her reading sci-fi and poetry. 

Alexandra Kralick

Robert wood johnson foundation Postdoctoral Fellow (she/her)

Alexandra Kralick is a Biological Anthropologist and a Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and Science. Her work examines gendered expectations of biological sex in the human and non-human primate skeleton. Here, she investigates the relationship between gender/sex, physical activity, and skeletal health. She has a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and a BS from The George Washington University.

Meredith Reiches

Visiting scholar

Meredith Reiches is a founding member of the Gender and Science Research Group, precursor to the GenderSci Lab. She is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Boston and a rabbinical student at Hebrew College. Reiches works at the intersection of evolutionary biology and gender and race ideology. She asks not only how human bodies grow and reproduce, but also how human histories and power relations structure what kinds of questions--and answers--researchers and publics are able to formulate and metabolize. Topics include: How do adolescent bodies navigate the transition from growth to reproductive function? How do social identities including gender and race become embodied during adolescence? How do contemporary, normative social systems like heterosexuality shape evolutionary narratives of human origins?Reiches’s peer-reviewed work has been published in journals including the American Journal of Human Biology; Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health; and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Together with lab colleagues, she has written for wider audiences on platforms including The New York Times, Slate, and The Guardian. In AY 2021-22, Reiches will work in a consulting capacity with the lab while she launches her rabbinical studies. You can think of her as the Labbi.

Tamara Rushovich

Lead for Quantitative Methods & Collaboration (she/her)

Tamara Rushovich is a PhD student studying social epidemiology in the Population Health Sciences program at Harvard University. She is interested in using theory and methods from epidemiology, sociology, and feminist and queer studies to understand how structural factors such as racism, sexism, and heterosexism influence health. Prior to starting at Harvard, she worked as an epidemiologist at the Chicago Department of Public Health. She received her BA and MPH from the University of Michigan in Sociology and Epidemiology respectively.

Alex Borsa (he/him)

Mentorship Maven

Alexander Borsa is a PhD student in Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University. He studies the sociological dimensions of public health, with a focus on sexual health provision and women's healthcare financing. Alex currently serves on the HIV Planning Group at the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and prior to starting his PhD, worked as an HIV Prevention and Treatment Specialist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

Rory Brinkmann (he/him)

Rory Brinkmann is an MD-PhD student in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is interested in the intersections of biomedicine, gender, sex, and race. He holds an MPhil in History from the University of Oxford and a BA in English Literature and Philosophy from Bowdoin College.

Joseph Dov Bruch (he/him)

director of Healthcare and Finance Research Team (visiting scholar)

Joseph Dov Bruch is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Chicago. He also directs the Health Care Finance Team at the Harvard GenderSci lab. Broadly, his research is focuses on financial systems, policies, and institutions and their influence on population health and health care delivery. Within the GenderSci lab, he examines the role of financial firms and investments in the “women’s health industry,” with a focus on venture capital firms and the femtech industry as well as private equity’s influence in women’s health. He is interested in feminist frameworks to draw links between capitalism and health.

Joseph graduated from Harvard University with a Ph.D. in Population Health Sciences and a Master’s Degree in Biostatistics. As a social epidemiologist, Joseph attends to the ways social structures and policies impact health and health equity.

Ann Caroline Danielsen (she/her)

Ann Caroline Danielsen is a PhD student in Population Health Sciences at the Harvard School of Public Health, from which she received her MPH in 2021. Her interest lies in exploring how interdisciplinary, critical approaches to public health can be mobilized to improve health equity - with a specific focus on gender. Prior to coming to Harvard, she received a bachelor in Biomedical Science from King’s College London and a master’s in History of Science, Technology and Medicine from the University of Manchester. In between different “waves” of Academia, she worked at the European CDC, in the private sector, and in Multiple Sclerosis clinical research.

Marina DiMarco (she/her)

Co-Director of Engaged Communications

Marina DiMarco is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy & Religion at Northeastern University. She works on the ethics, epistemology, and politics of the health and life sciences. She is especially interested in big data biology, biotechnology, and biosocial science.

Annika Gompers (she/her)

Co-Director of Engaged Communications

Annika Gompers is a PhD student in Epidemiology at the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health. She is interested in studying and addressing inequities in access to healthcare, particularly inequities linked to gender/sex, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Prior to starting at Emory, she worked as a data analyst in the OB/GYN Department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She received an MPhil in Health, Medicine, and Society from the University of Cambridge and an AB in Integrative Biology with a secondary in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality from Harvard College.

Abigail Higgins (she/her)

Abigail Higgins is a doctoral student in the Harvard History of Science department. She is interested in the history of biomedicine through the 20th and 21st centuries as well as sex, gender, and identity in medicine and life sciences research. Prior to joining the PhD program, she worked as a healthcare and life sciences strategy consultant.

Katherine MN Lee (she/her)

Katie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Tulane University. Prior to that she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Public Health Sciences at Washington University School of Medicine. She studies women’s health using theoretical perspectives derived from feminist biology, combining technical experience to optimize data collection and manipulation with anthropology to situate that data in social and historical contexts. She holds a PhD in Anthropology with a minor in Gender & Women’s Studies (UIUC), MS in Business Administration (Texas A&M-Texarkana), and BS in Biomedical Engineering (Tulane University).

Ben Maldonado (he/him)

Ben Maldonado is a doctoral student in the History of Science department. He is interested in the history and legacies of eugenics, sexology, studies of human sexual selection, and popular science, as well as how this history is told by groups such as the far-right and geneticists. Prior to coming to Harvard, he did his undergraduate work at Stanford University where he studied history.

Donna Maney

Visiting Scholar

Donna Maney is a neuroscientist at Emory University. Trained as a behavioral neuroendocrinologist, Donna has focused most of her career on the evolution, genetics, and hormonal basis of social behavior in nonhuman animals. Now at Harvard as a Radcliffe Fellow, Donna is exploring how sex differences are discovered and interpreted in biomedicine and how they shape health policy.

Jamie Marsella (she/her)

Jamie is a doctoral student in the History of Science department. She is interested in the intersection between race, gender, and medicine in the development of women and children’s public health programming. Before joining the Ph.D. program, Jamie worked in digital marketing and public relations for a variety of industries, including healthcare and education. She holds an MA from the University of Chicago.

Mia Miyagi (she/they)

Mia is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Computational Molecular Biology at Brown. She is interested in disentangling the genomic signals of gender-biased and sex-biased demographic events and exploring how gendered effects can create signs of sex differences in genetic data. Previously, she received her PhD in Organismic and Evolutionary biology from Harvard.

Audrey R Murchland (she/her)

Audrey R Murchland is PhD candidate in Population Health Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, concentrating in neuropsychiatric epidemiology. She previously received a BS in Anthropology at Baylor University and an MPH in Global Health Epidemiology at the University of Michigan. Her research interests focus on how social, lifecourse experiences influence aging inequalities.

Meg Perret (she/her)

Meg Perret is a graduate student in History of Science with a secondary field in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University. Her research interests include environmental humanities, feminist science studies, and queer theory.

Her dissertation analyzes the role of race, gender, and sexuality in scientific discourses of the future of Earth's biodiversity. She did her undergraduate work at UC Berkeley where she was a triple major in Gender & Women’s Studies, Integrative Biology, and Science & Technology Studies.

Madeleine Pape (she/her)

Madeleine is a sociologist at the University of Lausanne’s Institute of Social Sciences. Following her career as an Olympic athlete, she obtained her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research examines the epistemic politics that shape how “sex” is defined in national legislation and policies for inclusion in sport and biomedical research, including the role of feminist mobilization.

Maayan Sudai

director of Biology and Sexual Diversity in Law and Public Policy team

Maayan Sudai is an Assistant Professor of Law and of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Haifa. Maayan holds a doctorate (SJD) from Harvard Law School where she concentrated on health law, bioethics, and STS studies.

Maayan’s current research agenda examines the interaction between law and science as epistemological systems, focusing on how social movements use these systems to shape knowledge and policy. Her published work explores the incoherence between legal and scientific conceptions of sex and gender, and examines how legal professionals construct the meaning of these concepts in law and policy.

Helen Zhao (she/her)

Helen Zhao is a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University with a focus on feminist philosophy of science. Her dissertation is on the notion of ontological heterogeneity. She has written for Science for the People and Extinct: the Philosophy of Paleontology Blog.

Heather Shattuck-Heidorn (she/her)

consulting director

Heather Shattuck-Heidorn is a biological anthropologist who works at the intersections of public health, gender theory, and human biology, and is Assistant Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Southern Maine.

She uses gender theory to motivate hypothesis-based research examining how our social lives become embodied, reflected in our hormones, immune function, and other biology. Current projects include utilizing large datasets to recover the effects of gender on aspects of immune function, and a community-based research project investigating how gendered experiences influence stress and allostatic load in adolescents.

Capri D’Souza (she/her)

Capri D’Souza is an undergraduate Morehead-Cain Scholar at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill double majoring in Business Administration and Public Policy with a minor in Spanish. She is interested in the analysis of gender and sex in relation to public policy and health outcomes.

Alexandra Fair (she/her)

Alexandra is a doctoral student in African American Studies and an AM student in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her research examines the linguistic strategies Anglo-American eugenic theorists use to reconstitute eugenic ideology in modern academic and political spaces. She holds MA degrees in history from Miami University and the University of Reading. Prior to her graduate studies Alexandra conducted research on reproductive healthcare and policy for the International Planned Parenthood affiliate Sex og Politikk in Oslo, Norway and the Washington D.C. based non-profit Unite for Reproductive Gender and Equity

Michelle Frank (she/hers)

Michelle Frank is a postdoctoral fellow in the Neurobiology Department at Harvard Medical School where she uses tools from molecular biology and genetics to investigate the cells and circuits underlying the sense of hearing. She completed her PhD in Neurobiology at Harvard with a secondary field in Science, Technology, and Society (STS). In her time at Harvard, Michelle has also worked extensively with the Scientific Citizenship Initiative at Harvard Medical School, the GSAS Science Policy Group, and the science communication organization Science in the News.

Jonathan Galka (he/him)

Jonathan Galka is a PhD student in the department of the History of Science at Harvard University. His research deals broadly in the history of natural history, with focus on marine invertebrate biology.

He is interested in how evolutionary theory makes sense of sex and gender, and more specifically in the potential for feminist and queer science studies to help us understand relationships among organisms like symbiosis. Prior to beginning at Harvard, he spent a year on a Fulbright grant in Malaysia studying the uptake of PrEP for HIV among sexual and gender minorities, and before that, he completed undergraduate degrees in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and the History of Science & Medicine at Yale University.

Nayanika Ghosh (she/her)

Nayanika Ghosh is a PhD student with the department of the History of Science at Harvard. An anthropologist by training, she is interested in the history, politics, and the philosophy of biology.

Nayanika studies how the biology of human behavior became relevant to everyday discourse in the first place—especially in determining “feasible” political goals and economic systems. More broadly interested in how our biology came to be viewed as inherently limiting, Nayanika wishes to delve into the politics of sexual selection, and critically examine the explanatory power of ‘ultimate’ approaches to human behavior. She is also interested in the relationship between early twentieth-century British eugenics and the history of inferential statistics.

Delaney Glass (she/her)

Delaney Glass is a mixed methods anthropologist studying evolutionary and biocultural influences on child and adolescent development. She has broad interests in feminist STS, history of science, sociogenomics, and immunology. She is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Biological Anthropology at The University of Washington- Seattle. To find out more about Delaney visit her website: dglass.netlify.app

Kai Jillson (does not use pronouns)

Kai Jillson graduated from the University of Southern Maine, majoring in Human Biology with a minor in Biochemistry. This aspiring trauma surgeon is planning on attending medical school after graduation. Kai is the president of the Queer-Straight Alliance at USM and is focusing on researching how diverse genders and sexualities manifest in health care and public policy.

Jeff Lockhart (he/they)

Jeff Lockhart is a James S. McDonnell Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan as well as masters degrees in both gender studies and computer science. His research examines how identities such as sex, gender, sexuality, and race are constructed and contested in scientific, technological, and political arenas. Lockhart uses a mix of computational social science and qualitative archival methods in his research.

May Moorefield (she/her)

May is an undergraduate at Harvard College concentrating in History of Science with a secondary in Psychology.

She is interested in the biological embedding of socioeconomic inequities, particularly along axes of sex, gender, and race. In addition to her work at GenderSci, May conducts clinical research on epigenetic reprogramming at the Ksander Laboratory at Mass. Eye and Ear/ Harvard Medical School.

Nicole Noll (she/her)

Nicole Noll is a social psychologist who studies everyday actions like posture and gestures to understand their relationship to our thoughts and behaviors.

She is especially interested in movement habits that are typically thought of as gendered, or that are otherwise relevant to the experiences of members of marginalized groups. In her research, Nicole examines how kinematic embodiments of culturally- and historically-situated social categories (e.g., sex/gender, race, class, age, etc.) develop and change over time and contribute to individuals' lived experiences.

Kashfia Rahman (she/her)

Kashfia Rahman is an undergraduate at Harvard College studying History and Science with a secondary focus in Global Health and Health Policy. She is interested in healthcare disparities related to race, sex, gender, and immigration status. She is also passionate about the intersection between medicine and human rights, and has previously conducted policy research on maternal and child health in the U.S.

Mimi Tarrant (she/her)

Mimi Tarrant is an undergraduate at Harvard College, concentrating in Human Evolutionary Biology with a secondary in Economics. She is interested in the analysis of sex and gender through an evolutionary lens, and more specifically how these interact to create wide-held assumptions within the scientific community.

Brianna Weir (she/her)

Brianna Weir is a PhD student in the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Department at Harvard University.

She is interested in macroevolution and the ways that we understand adaptation, looking to complicate them using insights from natural history. In addition to investigating the conflict between parents and offspring in invertebrates, she has a deep curiosity about the ways that social negotiations shape the progress of science. She comes to Harvard with a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College.