Dorothy Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and the Law School, where she is the inaugural Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights. She is also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. An internationally recognized scholar and social justice activist, she has written and lectured extensively on race, gender, and class inequities in U.S. institutions and has been a leader in transforming thinking on reproductive freedom, child welfare, and bioethics. She is author of the award-winning Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty; Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare; Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century; and Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, as well as more than 100 articles and book chapters, including “Race” in the 1619 Project book.
Roberts has served on the boards of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Black Women’s Health Imperative, Center for Genetics and Society, Juvenile Law Center, and National Coalition for Child Protection Reform. Recent recognitions of her work include election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the National Academy of Medicine, Rutgers University-Newark Honorary Doctor of Law Degree, Juvenile Law Center Leadership Prize, Abortion Liberation Fund of PA Rosie Jimenez Award, New Voices for Reproductive Justice Voice of Vision Award, Society of Family Planning Lifetime Achievement Award, and American Psychiatric Association Solomon Carter Fuller Award. Her TED talk, “The Problem with Race-based Medicine,” has been viewed 1.5 million times.
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