Bios

Kate is a lecturer in STS and Cyberpsychology for the Department of Humanities at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, New Jersey. She holds a PhD in STS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where she researched the sociocultural effects of weight loss surgery. She earned her Master of Science in cognitive science in 2014 from RPI and her Bachelor of Science in computer science in 2010 from the University of Southern Maine. Her research interests include fat studies, biopolitics, language, identity formation, health and nutrition expertise, and the social institution of medicine. Outside of school, Kate enjoys swimming, camping, gaming, fiber arts, and cats.

Erin Johnson is a PhD candidate at the University of California San Francisco, where she has been a Cota-Robles and Rosenberg Hill Fellow. She specializes in mixed methods research and evaluation, with a particular focus on increasing access to care for disadvantaged populations. Erin earned her Masters of Public Health from Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, where she worked on several community-based HIV prevention projects. Since that time, Erin has worked at American Institutes for Research as a Research Associate and at Behavioral Health Concepts, Inc., as a Data Analyst. Erin’s research seeks to understand how our social construction of the “female” body as fertile and the valorization of motherhood as the ultimate feminine virtue affects health policy, medical practice, and personal experience around menstruation, contraception, and abortion. She is particularly interested in the ways socio-political systems punish individuals assigned female at birth who reject (or even appear to reject) motherhood, how they prioritize the health of potential future children over the health of patients capable of becoming pregnant, and how individuals and communities work to resist these oppressive systems.

Gareth Edel is an interdisciplinary social scientist currently lecturing at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Like his colleague Kate Tyrol, he holds a PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Science and Technology Studies. His primary academic interests focus on the institutions and culture of medicine today. His dissertation work and ongoing research have combined social science theories of Choice and Discourse Analysis, and have focused on the development and expansion of “Medical Tourism” as an industry. He has used his subject matter expertise to build new classes for NJIT on the medical humanities and the socio-cultural studies of medicine. He wants to know how everything works, and how everything got to be the way that it is, and tried to instill the same curiosity in his students. In his free time, Gareth enjoys reading about and playing tabletop RPGs, whittling, and catering to the whims of his cat.

Dorian Gittleman holds an MPH from the Rollins School of Public Health, where she focused on mental health as a public health issue. Her thesis research explored the different ways one could measure mental illness and distress, and how different measures could or could not predict other health behaviors. In her professional life, that work continues – she has made the transition from research to quality improvement and utilizes patient data to drive performance improvement at a large managed care organization. Her portfolio spans all areas of health for patients of all ages, but her arena of expertise remains behavioral health, and the bulk of her time is spent on interventions for the most difficult to help – those with severe mental illness and addiction, the “frequent fliers” of healthcare. Outside of the 9 to 5, Dorian is editing her first novel and listening to Dixieland jazz. She is probably on her way to New Orleans right now.