Stephen Molldrem is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioethics and Health Humanities, with membership In the Institute for Translational Sciences and the Institute for Bioethics and Health Humanities. He was previously a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Irvine in the Department of Anthropology, and received his PhD in American Culture with a Graduate Certificate in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. Molldrem’s research has been supported by numerous fellowships and grants, including an NIH bioethics supplement. His publications have appeared in an interdisciplinary range of venues, including The American Journal of Bioethics, Health Policy, Global Public Health, Critical Public Health, First Monday, The Journal of the History of Sexuality, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.

Dr. Molldrem is a qualitative researcher situated at the intersection of STS, public health ethics, critical bioethics, policy studies, and sexuality studies. Methodologically, he employs ethnography, varied qualitative approaches, policy analysis, social theory, and frameworks from STS such as infrastructure studies and actor-network theory. Dr. Molldrem also has interests in implementation science and in synthesizing styles of inquiry from that field with STS. His current program of research focuses on ethical and socio-technical issues that arise from uses of data about infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, M. tuberculosis (TB), and SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 by researchers and public health agencies, with a particular emphasis on pathogen genomic epidemiology. He also studies how the collection of data about sexuality and gender has been standardized in the US healthcare system, along with related issues in the history of academic sexology in the 20th century US. Stephen is an engaged scholar who works with multiple stakeholder groups on issues related to domestic and global health policy.