Editors
Dr. Melissa A. Bailar, Lead Editor is the Executive Director of the Medical Humanities Research institute at Rice University She is also Associate Director of the Medical Humanities Program and Senior Lecturer in the Medical Humanities Program at Rice, which hosts an interdisciplinary minor. Her past research focused on medical and anatomical museums and the history of anatomical models from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Dr. Bailar is also working on multimedia narratives of patient narratives of their experiences with health and illness.
Dr. Kim Dunn, Editor is the Founder and President of HealthQuilt; President of The Schull Institute; Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Biomedical Informatics, UTHealth The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Dr. Dunn is defining quality healthcare and continuing to trailblaze real-time virtual care, remote monitoring services, and the advancement of electronic medical records.
Philip L. Montgomery, Editor is an archivist and former head of the McGovern Historical Center, which is the archive and rare book library of the Texas Medical Center Library. As head of the McGovern he collaborated on projects with colleagues at Gakushin University in Tokyo to make archival records regarding the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission more accessible to the public.
Dr. Tomoko Y. Steen, Editor is the Director of two graduate programs, “Biomedical Science Policy and Advocacy” and “Biohazardous Threat Agents & Emerging Infectious Diseases,” and a Professor at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Georgetown University School of Medicine (GUSOM). She also has a joint appointment with the Department of Oncology at GUSOM. Over the years, Dr. Steen has been active in a broad range of scientific research projects ranging from theoretical population genetics to the epidemiology of anti-biotic-resistant strains. Current work is on microbiome and radiation.
Dr. Armin Weinberg, Editor is a Clinical Professor at Baylor College of Medicine (Medicine) and Adjunct Professor at Rice University in Kinesiology & Human Performance. He was a founder of the International Consortium for Research on the Health Effects of Radiation, in response to the Chernobyl nuclear accident and has spearheaded international healthcare partnerships in the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Russia, and Israel. Dr. Weinberg was also the Co-founder of the Intercultural Cancer Council and a founding board member of C-Change where he focused on translating discoveries in cancer prevention, screening, treatment and control activities to state and national initiatives and the elimination of health disparities.
Journal Staff
Dr. Brooke Clark, Managing Editor is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Rice University, where she received her Ph.D. in English in 2023. She has acted as the Editorial Assistant for other interdisciplinary academic journals, including SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 and Age, Culture, Humanities. As a researcher and instructor, she works in the fields of medical humanities, twentieth-century and contemporary literature, gender and sexuality studies, and psychoanalysis. She recently served as a Schull Summer Fellow, where she began an ongoing research project studying the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission Collection’s photographs of survivors held at the McGovern Historical Center in Houston. In addition to her work examining medical photographs, she is also writing projects that interrogate and listen to the ways modernist fiction and psychoanalysis render sexuality through aurality.
Manshi Patel, Journal Assistant is a Rice graduate that majored in biosciences and minored in medical humanities. Manshi has investigated the influence of art on trauma processing in for her capstone project. She has also researched implicit biases within biomedical devices, discrimination in vaccination availability depending on socioeconomic status, and lack of mental health resources for AAPI populations, with many of these projects building to policy work. Before entering into graduate school to study cancer biology, she is working on researching the impact of social media and public opinion on nuclear waste solutions.