Faculty

Melissa Creary, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Management and Policy in the School of Public Health.  She received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies (focusing on Health, History, and Culture) at the Graduate Institute for the Liberal Arts (ILA) and Masters in Public Health at Emory University. She served as a health scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the Division of Blood Disorders for nine years, where she helped create the first national program and data collection system for sickle cell disease (SCD) at the agency. Dr. Creary’s research and teaching interests broadly include how science, culture, and policy intersect.  Through this lens and using historical and ethnographic methods, she investigates how national policy for SCD is influenced by race and other notions of belonging. Her research also interrogates how inclusion and knowledge production are at odds with structural barriers.  In her most recent project, she analyzes how equity-based scientific and public health policies are incongruent to the very justice they are trying to produce. She has been published in Social Science and Medicine, Genetics in Medicine, The American Journal of Bioethics, and the Huffington Post.

Her research and teaching interests broadly include how science, culture, and policy intersect.  Through this lens and using STS-based, sociological and ethnographic methods, she investigates how national policy for SCD is influenced by race and other notions of belonging. Her research also interrogates how inclusion and knowledge production are at odds with structural barriers.  In her most recent project, she analyzes how equity-based scientific and public health policies are incongruent to the very justice they are trying to produce.  She is also interested in the ways in which technology gets gendered and is used as a tool of empowerment.

Ph.D. and M.P.H., Emory University