Rate My Professor Stephen Molldrem

Stephen Molldrem, PhD, serves as Assistant Professor and Research Program Director in the Department of Bioethics and Health Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, where he holds the James Wade Rockwell Distinguished Professorship in Medical Humanities. His academic background encompasses a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, along with a Certificate of Graduate Studies in Science, Technology, and Society and an MA in American Culture from the same institution. He earned a BA in Political Communication with Special Honors, magna cum laude, from The George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs. Molldrem also completed a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. As a member of the Institute for Translational Sciences, he is affiliated with the UTMB School of Public and Population Health and the Institute for Bioethics and Health Humanities.

An ethnographer, qualitative social researcher, and health policy scholar positioned within Science and Technology Studies, Molldrem's research interests include public health ethics, data studies, queer studies, the history of sexuality, and global health. For nearly a decade, his work has investigated the incorporation of digital infrastructures and pathogen genomics into public health programs for infectious diseases, including HIV, TB, and SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 in the US, Botswana, and global policy contexts. This research addresses ethical, legal, and social implications, such as transformations in consent politics, framings of disease evolution and transmission, and governance of sexuality in relation to transmission risk. Funded by the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, his collaborative interdisciplinary efforts have influenced relations between scientific institutions, public health agencies, and social movements. Molldrem has published in prominent journals including The American Journal of Bioethics, Social Studies of Science, Health Policy, BioSocieties, Global Public Health, and The Milbank Quarterly. Notable publications comprise "Developing a stakeholder-informed social responsibility model for translational science" (2025), "Efforts to evaluate translational science’s impact on biomedicine and society should incorporate Science and Technology Studies (STS)" (2025), "Flying blind: urgency for drug-resistant testing for new tuberculosis drugs" (2025), and "HIV Data and Public Health Ethics" (2025). He engages with stakeholder groups on domestic and global health policy issues.