Dr. Elena Conis, PhD

Elena Conis is a professor in the Graduate School of Journalism and the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also directs the joint graduate program in Journalism and Public Health. A former journalist, award-winning columnist, and historian, she studies how culture, values, politics, and media have shaped modern American medicine, public health, and environmentalism over time, and how scientific ideas about health and medicine are communicated to and received by the public in the present.

Her book Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization (University of Chicago Press) received the 2015 Arthur J. Viseltear Award from the American Public Health Association. Her forthcoming books include Pink and Blue: Gender, Culture, and the Health of Children (Rutgers University Press), and Science for Hire (Bold Type).

Her research has been supported by grants and awards from the National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Science History Institute, UCLA's Charles Donald O'Malley Research Fellowship, and Emory University, where she was previously a Mellon Foundation Faculty Fellow in Health and the Humanities and a faculty member in the Department of History.Prof.

Conis is an expert on the history of public health, vaccines and vaccination, epidemic diseases, and scientific controversies.

Sub specialities: vaccines, vaccination, measles, mumps, chicken pox, HPV, smallpox, polio, outbreaks, epidemics, pesticides, DDT, environmental health.