Editorial Team

Iro Filippaki


Iro is a medical humanities scholar working as an associate lecturer in Athens, Greece. Her research focuses on aspects of feeling in cultural and textual narratives, as well as literary representations of physical and mental trauma. She is the co-editor of a special issue of the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation titled “Trauma, Narratives, Institutions: Transdisciplinary Dialogues” and an editor for De Gruyter’s book series Computer Games and the Humanities. She just completed her first monograph titled The Poetics of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Postmodern Literature (Palgrave Macmillan) and is currently exploring representations of feeling resilient in contemporary literature.

Academia

Sarah Roth


Sarah Roth is a genetic counselor and PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Her work bridges the social sciences and humanities, exploring the experiences of patients, communities, and providers navigating shifting ethical, social, and technological terrains in cancer care and genomic medicine. Sarah was recently a predoctoral fellow in Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health.

Also a writer, Sarah is a Pushcart Prize nominee and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Notre Dame. She is a founding editor of Tendon and a contributing writer at Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal. Before arriving to Baltimore, Sarah coordinated programs at a health advocacy nonprofit in Washington, D.C.

Alise Leiboff


Alise Leiboff received her undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University in 2021, where she studied the Medical Humanities, French, and the Visual Arts. She then went on to obtain a Master’s degree in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University in 2023. Now a medical student at Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine and a vetted editor for Tendon Magazine, Leiboff seeks to tread the common ground between the health sciences, literature, and the arts.

Hannah Davidson


Hannah is an aspiring genetic counselor interested in how culture and society shape health and wellness. She has a longstanding commitment to maternal/reproductive health, shaped by several years of working as a full-spectrum doula. As a researcher, Hannah has extensive experience in quantitative and qualitative research methods, along with experience in various lab techniques. Long-term, Hannah hopes to build a career blending compassionate clinical care, mentorship/teaching, and research on issues related to the genetic counseling field.

Sarah El Halabi


Sarah is a second year Psychiatry resident at Westchester Medical Center/New York Medical College. She graduated medical school at the American University of Beirut in 2018. After that, she pursued a postdoctoral fellowship in clinical ethics and professionalism at her home institution. Prior to joining residency in 2021, she graduated from the Narrative Medicine program at Columbia, where she also taught facilitation. Her interests include storytelling, grief, the intersection of the medical and psychiatric, psychotherapy and cultural psychiatry. She is also heavily involved in both narrative medicine and psychiatric education and has functioned as a reviewer for societies such as the Society for the Study of Culture and Psychiatry, in addition to being a reviewer for several journals. Creatively, she is a growing poet and fiction writer and has contributed in both genres previously to Tendon. She looks forward to reading your work and working with the Tendon team and our wonderful readers.

Makenna May


Makenna is a ScM student in the Johns Hopkins/NIH Genetic Counseling Training Program. She is primarily interested in neurogenetics, specifically neurodegenerative diseases in adults. Makenna is originally from Chicago and earned her A.B. degree from Princeton University in 2017 in French Language and Literature. Makenna is most interested in the ethical and psychosocial components of genetic counseling, which drew her to the program at Johns Hopkins, and she is specifically interested in how genetic counselors and patients grapple with uncertainty. She loves reading, exploring photojournalism, and learning about language in all aspects, with a specific interest in how it impacts refugee migration and settlement.

Alexander Parry


Alex Parry is a Ph.D. candidate with the History of Medicine Department at Johns Hopkins. His dissertation charts the ways U.S. society has tried to control the use and sale of risky products and explains why longstanding approaches to home safety overburden women and low-income households. This project has received funding from institutions including the National Science Foundation and JHU Center for Injury Research and Policy.

Alex has published on U.S. public health with the Journal of the History of Biology, Isis, Nursing Clio, and the Washington Post. He also convenes the Injury Studies Research Network (ISRN), which brings together investigators from multiple disciplines to analyze the social and material realities of injuries and to propose forward-looking policy solutions.

SJ Zanolini


SJ Zanolini is a PhD candidate in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, with prior graduate degrees in Chinese Literature and Traditional East Asian Medicine. Their dissertation focuses on medicinal discourse about cheap and widely available foods such as porridge, sweet potatoes, and seaweed in early modern China, first as a means of describing everyday medical practices at the household level, and second to elaborate how intellectual theorizations of the physiology of taste fed competing understandings of chronic ailment, health, and longevity. An avid reader and writer, SJ is also working on a creative non-fiction book on migraines.