Udodiri R. Okwandu is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of the History of Science and Presidential Scholar at Harvard University. Udodiri is passionate about using her research to explore the rich and complex histories of Black Americans (and other marginalized communities) as they relate to medicine and science. She is particularly interested in the ways in which scientific and medical inquiry have been deployed by the State to manage and control marginalized populations. As such, her work critically examines science and medicine’s relationship to power and their ability to enact subjection.  Her dissertation traces how scientific and medical understandings of maternal mental illnesses – such as postpartum depression and psychosis – have been used to rationalize the “transgressive” behavior of childbearing women from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth century. In doing so, she demonstrates the ways in which these rationalizations served to either excuse or pathologize women in ways that mapped onto existing racial and class hierarchies. She illuminates the consequences of these discourses by examining various sites, including the courts, asylum, family planning clinic, psychoanalytic research “lab,” and sterilization laws.

Throughout her graduate training, Udodiri has remained invested in using her historical research to address racial inequity in medicine and gaps in science education. Since June 2021, Udodiri has 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 also works as a 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 has also actively contributed to campus life. From 2018 – 2020, Udodiri served as an Undergraduate Academic Advisor for students in the Department of History and Science at Harvard College. From 2019 – 2020, Udodiri served as a co-coordinator of the Harvard History of Medicine Working Group. From 2020 – 2021, she served as a Social Fellow for the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Student Center.

Udodiri graduated cum laude from Harvard College where she majored in History and Science and minored in Global Health and Health Policy. Her senior thesis, which won the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize, an award which recognizes outstanding scholarly work or research by students selected by a committee of faculty from Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, examined the medicalization and racialization of Civil Rights protests in the 1960s and 1970s, contextualizing it with the rise of law and order political ideology. After graduation, she relocated to Washington D.C. where she worked as a technology research consultant.