Dorothy Roberts
DOROTHY ROBERTS is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor and George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. Professor Roberts is the author of the award-winning books, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (1997); Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2002); and Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (2011); as well as co-editor of six books on constitutional law and gender.
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Rick Kittles
RICK KITTLES, who received his PhD in Biological Sciences, is professor and founding director of the Division of Health Equities within the Department of Population Sciences and Associate Director of Health Equities in the Comprehensive Cancer Center at City of Hope Hospital in California. Dr. Kittles’ research has focused on understanding the complex issues surrounding race, genetic ancestry and health disparities. He has been at the forefront of the development of ancestry-informative genetic markers and how genetic ancestry can be quantified and utilized in genomic studies on disease risk and outcomes. His work has shown the impact of genetic variation across populations in pharmacogenomics, biomarker discovery and disease gene mapping. In 2003, Dr. Kittles co-founded African Ancestry, Inc., a private company that provides DNA testing services for tracing African genetic lineages to genealogists and the general public around the world.
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Premesh Lalu
PREMESH LALU is Director of the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape, a national flagship project of the Department of Science and Technology and the National Research Foundation in South Africa. Professor Lalu has published widely in academic journals on South African history, and more broadly, on the reconstitution of the study of the Humanities in Africa. Lalu is a regular contributor to public debate on higher education and the future of the humanities in local and international newspapers. His book, The Deaths of Hintsa: Postapartheid South Africa and the Shape of Recurring Pasts (2009) argues that in order to forge a concept of apartheid that allows us to properly formulate a deeper meaning of the post-apartheid, what is necessary is a postcolonial critique of apartheid. His current research on the theme of a post-apartheid practice of freedom is focussed on memory, technology and the human condition. Lalu is a board member of the Consortium for Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI), Chairperson of the Handspring Puppet Company Trust and a former trustee of the District Six Museum.
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