Affiliate Faculty
Paul S. Applebaum, MD
- Affiliate Faculty
Paul S. Applebaum, MD, is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine, and Law, and Director, Center for Law, Ethics, and Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University. His research focuses on ethical, legal and social issues related to advances in genetics, as well as mental health law. The author of many articles and books on law and ethics in clinical practice and research, Dr. Appelbaum is a Past President of the American Psychiatric Association and chairs the DSM Steering Committee. A graduate of Columbia College and Harvard Medical School, he has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine.
Merlin Chowkwanyun, PhD, MPH
- Affiliate Faculty
Merlin Chowkwanyun's work centers on the history of community health; environmental health regulation; racial inequality; and social movement/activism around health. He just finished a book called All Health Politics is Local: Battles for Community Health in the Mid-Century United States, which will be published by UNC Press. He is working on another book on political unrest at medical schools and neighborhood health activism during the 1960s and 1970s. Chowkwanyun is also the PI (co-PI David Rosner) on a recent National Science Foundation Standard Research Grant for ToxicDocs.org, a depository of millions of pages of once-secret documents on industrial poisons. He teaches courses on health advocacy and mixed methods, and in the CORE, co-teaches the social determinants module. He is most proud of the two teaching awards he has won at Mailman for Excellence in Teaching and Innovation in Teaching.
Noémie Elhadad, PhD
- Affiliate Faculty
Noémie Elhadad is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. She is affiliated with Columbia’s Department of Computer Science and the Columbia Data Science Institute.
She obtained her PhD in 2006 in Computer Science, focusing on multi-document, patient-specific text summarization of the clinical literature. She was on the Computer Science faculty at The City College of New York and the CUNY graduate center starting in 2006 before joining the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Columbia in 2007. Dr. Elhadad served as Chair of the Health Analytics Center at the Columbia Data Science Institute from 2013 to 2016.
Dr. Elhadad’s research lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence, human-centered computing, and medicine, with a focus on developing novel machine-learning methods. She creates methods and tools to support patients and clinicians in their information needs, with particular focus on ensuring that AI systems of the future are fair and just.
Rebecca Jordan-Young, PhD
- Affiliate Faculty
Rebecca Jordan-Young, PhD, Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, is an interdisciplinary scientist and science studies scholar who explores reciprocal relations between science and the social hierarchies of gender, sexuality, class, and race. The author of two award-winning books and many articles in a wide range of science and humanities journals, her work has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Brocher Foundation, the NSF, the NIH, the Social Science Research Council, and others.
Ruth Ottman, PhD
- Affiliate Faculty
Dr. Ruth Ottman is Professor of Epidemiology (in Neurology and the Sergievsky Center) and Deputy Director for Research at the Sergievsky Center, Columbia University. She is also a Research Scientist in the Division of Translational Epidemiology, New York State Psychiatric Institute.
Dr. Ottman is a genetic epidemiologist whose research aims to unravel the complex genetic and nongenetic influences on neurologic disorders. Much of her work has focused on the epilepsies. Her research group was the first to recognize the familial epilepsy syndrome “autosomal dominant partial epilepsy with auditory features” and to identify LGI1 as a major susceptibility gene for the disorder. She is a primary investigator in large epilepsy genetics research consortia, including the Epilepsy Phenome/Genome Project and Epi4K, which is using genome sequencing to identify genes that influence epilepsy susceptibility. She is also deputy director of the Columbia Center for Research on Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Psychiatric, Neurologic, and Behavioral Genetics. Her current research focuses on the psychosocial impacts of genetic research and practice among persons affected by or at risk for neurologic disorders.
Lesley A. Sharp, PhD
- Affiliate Faculty
As a medical anthropologist, Lesley Sharp’s research addresses themes of suffering and survival, body commodification, death and memorialization, and end-of-life care. Her earliest work concerned religious healing, the gendered nature of power, and economic displacement in Madagascar; since the 1990s her research has addressed the moral underpinnings and consequences of innovative biomedicine and science. Investigative domains include the ideological and embodied consequences of human organ transfer; the imaginative and temporal dimensions of highly experimental transplant technologies; the everyday ethics of human-animal encounters in experimental laboratories; and, most recently, the quality of end-of-life care in U.S. prisons. Sharp is the recipient of several awards, including a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2019 Wellcome Medal for Anthropology as Applied to Medical Problems by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland for her book Animal Ethos, and the 2008 New Millennium Book Award of the Society for Medical Anthropology for Strange Harvest. In 2022, her article “Death and Dying in Carceral America: The Prison Hospice as an Inverted Space of Exception” won the Inaugural Leah M. Ashe Prize for the Anthropology of Medically-Induced Harm of the Society for Medical Anthropology. Sharp holds the Barbara Chamberlain & Helen Chamberlain Josefsberg ’30 Professorship in Anthropology at Barnard College, and she is a Senior Research Scientist in Sociomedical Sciences the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University.
