Afternoon Panel: Long Division: Race and Science at a Crossroads

Angela Saini is a British journalist based in New York and the author of four books, including Superior: The Return of Race Science, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, which has been translated into fourteen languages. Her latest book The Patriarchs, on the origins of patriarchy, was hailed as a highlight for 2023 by the Financial Times, The Guardian and Publishers Weekly. Angela has a Masters in Engineering from the University of Oxford and in 2022 was a Logan Nonfiction Fellow in New York and a resident scholar at the Humboldt Foundation in Berlin. She has delivered distinguished lectures and keynotes at Oxford, Yale, Princeton and CERN in Geneva.

C. Brandon Ogbunu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe institute. He is a computational biologist whose research investigates complex problems in epidemiology, biomedicine, genetics, and evolution. In addition, he runs a parallel research program at the intersection of science, society, and culture. In this capacity, he writes, gives public lectures, and creates media of various kinds.

Jyoti Madhusoodanan is an independent journalist based in Portland, Oregon. She covers the life sciences, STEM careers, health and health disparities for Nature, Scientific American, The New York Times and other outlets. Her reporting on clinical trials and health inequities has received support from the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Her 2020 Knight Science Journalism fellowship project focused on how the racialization of biomedical research has impacted medical care for people of color.

Alan Goodman, professor of biological anthropology at Hampshire College, teaches and writes on the health and nutritional consequences of poverty, inequality and racism. He previously served as Hampshire’s Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty. Goodman is a past President of the American Anthropological Association and co-directs its public education project on race (understandingrace.org). He has written over one hundred articles and is the editor or author of a variety of books including “Building a New Biocultural Synthesis,” “Nutritional Anthropology, Race: Are We So Different?” and most recently, “Racism, Not Race” (with Joseph Graves).

Ashley Smart is the associate director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT and a senior editor at Undark magazine. He previously spent eight years as an editor and reporter at Physics Today magazine and cofounded the science news blog HBSciU. Ashley was a 2015-16 Knight Science Journalism fellow and is a member of the advisory board of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. Ashley has a PhD in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Northwestern University, in Evanston, IL.

Tom Zeller Jr. has spent two decades covering technology, energy policy, poverty, and the environment for a variety of national and international publications, including 12 years as a staff writer and editor at The New York Times. Tom is a former grantee of the International Reporting Project, and he was selected as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow in 2013. He joined the KSJ program as the founding editor of Undark in 2015.