Udodiri R. Okwandu is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of the History of Science and Presidential Scholar at Harvard University. Her scholarship and teaching explore the history of race, gender, and medicine and sociocultural understandings of health and disease in the United States from the late 19th century to the present. Her dissertation traces how racial science and radicalized constructions of motherhood have informed the evolving classification, diagnosis, and treatment of maternal mental illnesses – such as postpartum depression and psychosis. In doing so, she illustrates how diagnostic and therapeutic practices associated with maternal mental illness disproportionately reinforce the conflation between “whiteness” and “good mothering”, and “blackness” and “pathological mothering”. Udodiri speaks widely on the history of medicine to shed light on health disparities and social inequality and to promote justice.