Dr. Alexandre White, PhD (co-host) is an associate professor of History of Medicine and Sociology at Johns Hopkins University and co-director of the Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine. He is an expert in the sociology of race and ethnicity and comparative historical sociology. His work examines the social effects of infectious epidemic outbreaks in both historical and contemporary settings as well as the global mechanisms that produce responses to outbreak. Dr. White has published extensively in social science and medical journals on the topics of racism, slavery and medicine. His book Epidemic Orientalism: Race, Capital and the Governance of Infectious Disease from Stanford University Press and explores the historical roots of international responses to epidemic threats.

Marian Robbins, MA (co-host and editor) is the Administrative Program Specialist for the Center for Medical Humanities & Social Medicine and the Institute for the History of Medicine. She has been working for Johns Hopkins University for over a decade and has coordinated and collaborated in numerous speaker series, conferences, and events among other duties facilitating courses, editing social media and webpages, and more. Marian earned an MA in Folklore and Folk Studies from Western Kentucky University. She also grew up on a family farm and hopes to bring a perspective outside of the world of academic universities and research to the web series.

Antoinette Cooper is a poet, Collective Trauma Facilitator, and founder of Black Exhale, a non-profit dedicated to healing intergenerational trauma in Black Communities. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and serves on the Advisory Board for City University School of Medicine’s Narrative Medicine Track.

Cooper’s work has appeared in Intima: Journal of Narrative Medicine, The Amistad, and The Poetry Foundation. Her approach has been featured at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, Columbia University, and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Cooper’s groundbreaking collection of documentary poetry Unruly is a powerful fusion of poetry, memoir, and history that makes visible Black women’s experiences with medical racism and bodily autonomy.

Jason is the Project Director and Lead Oral Historian for the Organization for American Historian’s Federal Employees and Contractors Oral History Project. Jason earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and his scholarship works at the intersection of the history of medicine, public health, child health, health policy, urban history, and environmental history in the U.S. since 1945. Jason served as the historian for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. His tenure at the FDA ended on February 14, 2025, following his termination by DOGE, and he was placed on administrative leave. He officially left the agency in September.

Prior to his work at the FDA, Jason was the Council on Library and Information Resources Opioid Research Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His current book project, Forgotten Victims: Pediatric AIDS and the Urban Ecology of Health in the United States, 1950–2015, uncovers the overlooked history of how the HIV/AIDS pandemic impacted children born with the disease in the U.S.