Keith A. Wailoo is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University, with joint appointments in the Department of History, Program in History of Science, School of Public and International Affairs, and Center for Health and Wellbeing. He served as Chair of the Department of History from 2017 to 2020 and Vice Dean of the School of Public and International Affairs from 2013 to 2015. Previously, Wailoo was Townsend Martin Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton from 2010 to 2017, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of History and founding director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University from 2006 to 2010, and professor in the Department of Social Medicine and Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1992 to 2001. He earned a B.A. in Chemical Engineering from Yale University in 1984 and a Ph.D. in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992.

Wailoo's research examines the intersections of medicine, race, public policy, and science in modern America, including health disparities, drugs and drug policy, pain and opioids, genetic medicine, sickle cell disease, cancer, and menthol cigarettes. His award-winning books include Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold History of the Menthol Cigarette (University of Chicago Press, 2021), which received the Hughes Prize from the British Society for the History of Science in 2023; Pain: A Political History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); How Cancer Crossed the Color Line (Oxford University Press, 2011); The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine: Ethnicity and Innovation in Tay-Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis, and Sickle Cell Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), winner of the William H. Welch Medal, Lillian Smith Book Award, and others; and Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), recipient of the Arthur Viseltear Award. He has co-edited Medicare and Medicaid at 50: America’s Entitlement Programs in the Age of Affordable Care (Oxford University Press, 2015) and others. Wailoo received the Dan David Prize in 2021, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021 and National Academy of Medicine in 2007, and served as president of the American Association for the History of Medicine from 2020 to 2022. He co-chairs the National Academies committee on equity and innovation in health and medicine, has served on Institute of Medicine committees, and contributes to public discourse in outlets including The Lancet, New York Times, and NPR.

Professional Email: kwailoo@princeton.edu