Carolyn Roberts, PhD

Dr. Carolyn Roberts is an historian of science and medicine at Yale University. She holds a joint appointment in the departments of History/History of Science and Medicine, and African American Studies. She also holds a secondary appointment at Yale School of Medicine in the Program in the History of Medicine. Her research interests concern the history and present-day legacies of race and racism in science, medicine, and healthcare.

A central question that drives Dr. Roberts’ research, teaching, and scholarship is this: How can we reduce bias in medicine and science, lessen racial health disparities, and support clinician thriving by mobilizing historical knowledge within strategic, targeted, multidisciplinary solutions in health care today? With rigor and compassion, Dr. Roberts has been actively creating usable history that contributes to models for racial health equity, supports improvements in medical and nursing training, offers increased racial literacy for clinicians, and advances innovations in STEM pedagogy to promote scientific excellence for STEM students of all backgrounds.

To further this work, Dr. Roberts is currently building the Roberts Lab for Innovation in Race, Health, and Justice. As an applied medical history and mixed methods research hub, the Roberts Lab seeks to catalyze institutional and societal change around issues of race and health equity. This will include designing and implementing pedagogical and curricular innovation in the health care education sector, cutting-edge research into harm reduction and bias eradication, and developing community-driven health initiatives that create a trickle-up effect to improve quality of care at the institutions meant to serve them.

Dr. Roberts is currently working on several book manuscripts, including To Heal and to Harm: An Origin Story of Predatory Medicine in the Western World, which is under contract with Harvard University Press. The book tells the story of the health care system created to support the early modern human trafficking industry (i.e., the slave trade) and its current legacies. Trafficking millions of African children, women, and men across the Atlantic posed a massive health care challenge that had never existed before in the history of the world. Predatory medicine was an innovation born out of this unique moment when biology and economics, medical exploitation and profit existed in a bold new relationship. With a focus on the British slave trade, Dr. Roberts delves deeply into the lived experiences of British and African doctors, scientists, nurses, patients, and apothecaries, as well as early British pharmaceutical companies, to demonstrate how the transatlantic slave trade helped birth medical modernity and how predatory forms of medicine remain with us today.

Dr. Roberts is an award-winning educator with deep passion for her students. She is the 2023 recipient of Yale’s oldest teaching award, the DeVane Medal for Scholarship and Teaching. She is the 2021 recipient of Yale’s prestigious Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities. Professor Roberts teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of race, science, and medicine from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Her teaching blends history with medical sociology and public health to explore present-day crises related to race, racism, and health. Professor Roberts’ courses draw hundreds of students, including her wildly popular lecture course “Sickness and Health in African American History” which gained notice as the largest course enrollment at the university in Spring of 2022. (The course is currently on hiatus). In her classroom – whether with five students or five hundred – Professor Roberts creates learning communities that foreground care, curiosity, compassion, and deep listening as core competencies necessary to wrestle with the complex issues of our day.

Dr. Roberts is also a popular workshop leader and speaker. She brings critical historical perspectives to anti-racism interventions in science, medicine, and public health. Dr. Roberts has worked with a variety of corporations, non-profit organizations, and institutions including PBS/NOVA, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Mt. Sinai Morningside, and many colleges and universities. Her media appearances include the PBS/NOVA documentary The Violence Paradox and CNN.

Dr. Roberts received an M.A. and PhD from Harvard University, an M.A. from Andover Newton Theological School, and a B.A. from Dartmouth College.