Ramya Rajagopalan

Ramya M. Rajagopalan was a research fellow in the Beckman Center at the Institute. Her work explores the social dimensions of emerging technologies at the nexus of genetics, biomedicine, and health. Drawing on ethnographic and archival methods, Ramya studied how scientists, clinicians, and health institutions design new tools to study disease across the scales of human biology, with a view to understanding their broader social consequences. She also examined the intersections of genomics and social categories of identity, the emergence of precision medicine and the role of “omics” and “big data” in clinical diagnosis and treatment, and the dynamics of interdisciplinary collaboration in the life sciences.

Selected Publications

Rajagopalan, R.M., A. Nelson, and J.H. Fujimura. (2016) “Race and Science in the Twenty-First Century.” In U. Felt, R. Fouché, C.A. Miller, L. Smith-Doerr (eds.) The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, 4th edition (pp. 349–378), MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.

Rajagopalan, R., and J.H. Fujimura (2012) “Will Personalized Medicine Challenge or Reify Categories of Race and Ethnicity?” American Medical Association Journal of Ethics 14(8): 657–663.

Fujimura, J.H., and Rajagopalan, R. (2011).  “Different Differences:  The Use of Ancestry versus Race in Biomedical Human Genetic Research.”  Social Studies of Science 41(1):5–30.