Udodiri R. Okwandu, PhD is a historian of science and medicine. She is currently a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her scholarship and teaching contextualize profound racial, gender, and class inequities within the U.S. healthcare landscape. She is particularly interested in examining the historical contexts of psychiatric and reproductive health injustices and sociocultural understandings of health and disease.

As a Presidential Scholar at Harvard University, she earned her PhD and MA in the History of Science.  Her dissertation, “Madness and Motherhood in Black and White: Racial Logics in Medical Responses to Maternal Mental Illness and Deviance, 1890 – 1970,” investigated how racial science and racialized constructions of motherhood informed the evolving classification, diagnosis, and treatment of maternal mental illnesses (i.e., mental disorders associated with pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period) in the United States from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Recognizing that concepts of motherhood, insanity, and deviance are deeply embedded in larger racial discourses, her dissertation asked how medical constructions of maternal mental illness have been both informed by and (re)produced the American sociocultural ideal of a mother who is white, middle-class, and domestic. In doing so, it illustrated how racialized diagnostic and therapeutic practices associated with maternal mental illness protected hegemonic constructions of white womanhood by reinforcing the conflation between “whiteness” and “good mothering” and “blackness” and “pathological mothering.”

Udodiri is passionate about the power of historical scholarship to address racial inequity in medicine and gaps in science education. From 2021 to 2024, Udodiri served as an Anti-Racist Science Education Research and Content Development Consultant for LabXchange, a free science education platform that serves over 10 million learners and educators worldwide. She has also worked as a Creative and Content Consultant with Ancestry – the largest genealogy company in the world. Finally, from 2020 – 2021, Udodiri served as a Research Historian for the HistoryMakers, a non-profit research and educational institution committed to preserving and making widely accessible the untold stories of African Americans.

Udodiri is the proud daughter (out of seven) of Nigerian immigrants. Outside of research, writing, and teaching, Udodiri enjoys community-building, exploring the aerial arts, writing poetry, painting, reading, and spending time outdoors.