Joint PhD Program in Urban Systems

Stephen Pemberton
Associate Professor
Federated Department of History
New Jersey Institute of Technology
stephen.pemberton@njit.edu

Biography

Stephen Pemberton, PhD, is a historian of medicine and public health, biomedical sciences and technology. His research specialty is the history of diseases and their management. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2001.

Pemberton is author, most recently, of The Bleeding Disease: Hemophilia and the Unintended Consequences of Medical Progress (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). The book examines the promising and perilous history of American efforts to manage hemophilia in the twentieth century, including the era of tainted transfusions in the 1980s that witnessed the vast majority of Americans with hemophilia contracting HIV/AIDS through their blood plasma treatments.
He is also co-author of The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine: Ethnicity and Innovation in Tay-Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis and Sickle Cell Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). The book treats the histories of Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis, and sickle cell anemia as a lens for understanding how innovative medicine and cultural diversity have intersected in America.