Alexandra Halberstam

Halberstam headshot
ahalberstam@g.harvard.edu

Research Interests: Incarceration and health; medicine and social control; health justice; infectious disease; citizenship, migration and belonging; politics of memory.

Alexandra Halberstam (she/her) is a MD-PhD student at Harvard Medical School and Harvard GSAS’s Department of the History of Science. Her interests include the history of surveillance in infectious disease control, the construction of patient noncompliance, and the bidirectional relationship between clinical practice in correctional settings and carceral logics in community medicine.

Her undergraduate thesis in History of Science, Medicine, & Public Health investigated the multidrug resistant tuberculosis outbreak in the 1990s, and how carceral policies infused the US response. Her Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology undergraduate thesis explored opportunities for precision therapies by examining substrate preference in melanoma subtypes.  

Alex was a 2022-23 Humboldt Fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, where she studied epigenetic aging and intergenerational trauma. Since 2020, she has worked with the SEICHE Center for Health and Justice in New Haven, investigating how incarceration exposure affects the health of people who have been incarcerated, their families, and their communities.

Previous Degrees:

B.S., History of Science and Medicine; Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, Yale University

Bios: The Sciences of Life

Talk Series

Bios will host conversations with scholars across the life sciences and social sciences. It is envisaged as a bridge to help connect us to the most exciting research in biology (and its permutations in bioengineering, biopharma, biotech, and biosecurity). We seek to host speakers from a range of contexts and viewpoints—including academia, industry, regulatory, and research perspectives.

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