Michael Yudell

Biography

"Michael Yudell is currently Chair and Associate Professor in the Dornsife School of Public Health Department of Community Health and Prevention at Drexel University. He is also Director of the Program in Public Health Ethics and History at the Dornsife School of Public Health. Yudell received his PhD and MPH from Columbia University and his BA from Tufts. He is the author Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the 20th Century (Columbia University Press, 2014), a history that examines the way biologists, especially 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. Yudell is the author, with Rob DeSalle, of Welcome to the Genome: A User's Guide to the Genetic Past, Present, and Future (John Wiley and Sons, 2004). Yudell and DeSalle also edited The Genomic Revolution: Unveiling the Unity of Life (Joseph Henry Press of the National Academy of Science, 2002). He is currently writing Ages of Uncertainty: Autism Spectrum Disorders and the Search for Cause and Cure, a history of autism spectrum disorders. Yudell is currently the primary investigator on a grant funded by Autism Speaks looking at the ethical challenges of communicating scientific findings from autism research. Yudell also writes the blog ""The Public's Health"" for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Outside of his academic life, Yudell appears monthly with the improv group Study Hall at the Philadelphia Improv Theater. "

Research Interest

Autism spectrum disorders