Ben Maldonado

Research Interests: History of medicine; history of biology; history of the body; history of sex, gender, and sexuality; age and aging studies; risk, prediction, and insurance; feminist science studies; history of eugenics.

Ben Maldonado is a PhD candidate in the History of Science at Harvard University. His research examines scientific conceptions of sex, gender, race, and age in twentieth-century United States. His dissertation, tentatively titled “The Measure of Life: How Age Became Biological in the Twentieth-Century United States,” offers a genealogy of the concept of biological age. It traces how biological age—an articulation of age based on assessments of the body, as opposed to chronological age measured in calendar years—was utilized across a heterogeneous array of disciplines and sites, including life insurance medical examinations, child development research, rejuvenation clinics, sexology, radiation effects research, gerontology, and commercial longevity clinics. Rather than treating biological age as a solely gerontological concept, his dissertation argues that it served a variety of functions across disciplines, with differing definitions and methods of assessment. The dissertation further demonstrates how biological age intersected with ideas about sex and race as a discourse of human difference. 

He is also an active member of the GenderSci Lab, an interdisciplinary and collaborative research lab aimed at generating new concepts and methods for the scientific study of sex and gender. Within the GenderSci Lab, he has held lab management roles, led collaborative research teams, and co-authored articles published in The New England Journal of Medicine and Big Data & Society. Additionally, he maintains a long-term research project on the history of eugenics in the United States, with a particular focus on eugenic discourses in sexual and marital education and on eugenics research and programs at American universities.

Publications:

K. Ichikawa, M. Boulicault, A. Thinius, M. DiMarco, A. R. Murchland, B. Maldonado, A. S. Higgins, S. S. Richardson, “Sex in the Medical Machine: How Algorithms Can Entrench Bioessentialism in Precision Medicine,” Big Data & Society 12 no. 4 (2025).

B. Maldonado, J. Marsella, A. Higgins, S. S. Richardson, “Malicious Midwives, Fruitful Vines, and Bearded Women – Sex, Gender, and Medical Expertise on the Journal,” New England Journal of Medicine 90 no. 21 (2024): 1941–1947. 

Presentations: 

“Aging Sperm: Semen Analysis, Sex Hormones, and Quantifying Physiological Age,” Panel, Annual Meeting of History of Science Society, Edinburgh, Scotland, July 13, 2026. 

“Labor, Sex, and the Construction of ‘Normal Aging’ at the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, 1958 –1980," Panel, Annual Meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine, Buffalo, NY, June 5, 2026.

“Nuclear Aging: American Radiation Research, Colonial Science, and Measuring Age in the Marshall Islands,” Panel, Historicizing Calendar Age Workshop, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, April 17, 2026.

“Against the ‘Tyranny of the Calendar:’ Sexology, Gerontotherapy, and Harry Benjamin’s Biological Age Estimation,” Panel, History of Science Society Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA, November 15, 2025.

“The Historical Roots of Injustice in Medicine: Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in the Journal,” Panel, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, November 20, 2024.

“Perceiving Deviancy: Robert Latou Dickinson’s Search for Autoerotic Sight, 1902–1950,” Panel, Annual Meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine, Ann Arbor, MI, May 13, 2023. 

“Underwriting Heredity: Anglo-American Life Insurance and Tubercular Family Histories, 1875–1925,” Panel, Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Biology, New Haven, CT, April 15, 2023. 

“What a Eugenicist Ought to Know: Eugenic Advice in American Marriage Manuals, 1900–1945,” Poster, Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, New York, NY, January 5, 2020.

Previous Degrees:

B.A., History, Stanford University