(Note: this bio was current at the time of website publication. For the most up-to-date biography for this individual, please consult Linkedin.) Harriet A. Washington is a prolific science writer, editor, and ethicist who has authored six well-received books, including the seminal Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Oakland Award, and the American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award.
Washington is a writing fellow in bioethics at Harvard Medical School, a fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, and was the 2015-2016 Miriam Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada’s Black Mountain Institute. She has also been a research fellow in medical ethics at Harvard Medical School, a visiting fellow at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law and a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University. She has held fellowships at Stanford University and teaches bioethics at Columbia University, where she delivered the 2020 commencement speech to Columbia’s School of Public Health graduates and won Columbia’s 2020 Mailman School Of Public Health’s Public Health Leadership Award, as well as its 2020-21 Kenneth and Mamie Clark Distinguished Lecture Award.