

Research Bio
Professor Elena Conis is a historian of science and medicine whose research focuses on scientific controversies, science denial, and the public understanding of science. She is the author of How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT, which received the 2024 William H. Welch Medal and was a finalist for the 2023 National Association of Science Writers Book Award; Vaccine Nation: America's Changing Relationship with Immunization, which received the 2015 Arthur J. Viseltear Award; and, with Aimee Medeiros and Sandra Eder, Pink and Blue: Gender, Culture and the Health of Children. Her current book project, Measles: A Global History, is under contract with Polity Press. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Institutes of Health/National Library of Medicine, and the Science History Institute.
Conis is currently Professor and Acting Dean of UC Berkeley Journalism. She is an affiliate of Berkeley's History Department and Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society, and the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. Before coming to Berkeley, she was a professor of history and the Mellon Fellow in Health and Humanities at Emory University and an award-winning health columnist and reporter for the Los Angeles Times.
Research Expertise and Interest
history of medicine, history of public health, environmental history, US history, global health history, pesticides, vaccines, infectious disease, epidemics, science communication, public understanding of science, measles, mumps, chicken pox, hepatitis B, HPV, smallpox, polio