Bio:
Chloe Silverman, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Politics and the Center for Science, Technology, & Society at Drexel University. She completed her PhD in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
She works in three related areas. Most centrally, she is interested in histories of contested illnesses in both human and animal populations. Diagnoses that become sources of political and professional debate offer ways of understanding the social dynamics of medicine and healthcare institutions. Second, she is interested in how knowledge claims made by a range of communities, including medical professionals, advocates, and caregivers, draw on different types of expertise. Finally, she conducts research on the ethical consequences of taking seriously these different ways of knowing about health and illness. Silverman’s research topics, including parent advocacy for autism, autism research ethics, and pollinator health research, serve as ways to explore these problems. She is completing a book on the nature of health and veterinary treatment for honey bees and other managed pollinator species, Uncertain Illness: Honey Bee Health and Medical Meaning. She teaches courses at Drexel on a range of topics in Politics and STS, including Animal Politics, Neuroethics, Addiction and Society, and the Politics of Food.
Silverman has served as PI on multiple grants from the National Science Foundation (Award #1424768 and Award #1737149), and has published in journals including Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, History of Psychiatry, Nature + Culture, Autism in Adulthood, Autism, and Notes and Records. She currently serves as an editor for BioSocieties, a journal devoted to social and ethical studies of the life sciences and biomedicine.