Jennifer L. Derr is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she serves as the founding director for the Center for the Middle East and North Africa. She completed a PhD in History at Stanford University in 2009. She also holds a Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences from Stanford University and a Master of Arts from Georgetown University in Contemporary Arab Studies. Professor Derr’s research explores the intersections among science, medicine, political economy, and the environment in the modern Middle East. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Hellman Foundation, the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the Social Science Research Council, the American Research Center in Egypt, the Mellon Foundation, and the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2019, she was awarded the National Science Foundation’s five-year CAREER grant to support a broad research agenda focused on “the History of Science at the Interface of Biomedical and Environmental Concerns.”
