Dr. Stephen Molldrem is an Assistant Professor in Bioethics and Health Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), within the School of Public and Population Health. He also serves as Research Program Director for Bioethics and Health Humanities and is a faculty member in the Institute for Translational Sciences (ITS). Stephen is an ethnographer, qualitative social researcher, and health policy scholar working mainly in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). He also works across public health ethics, data studies, queer studies, the history of sexuality, and global health.

His program of research is divided into four thematic clusters, which are often intersecting:

1. Social and ethical studies of emerging technologies in infectious disease control

2. Critical data studies, data ethics, and infrastructure studies

3. Sexuality, technology, and biomedicine in social and historical context

4. The ethics and practice of translational science

Broadly, Stephen’s scholarship is animated by a desire to understand how digital technologies, emergent areas of biomedical knowledge, and public health policies shape people, institutions, and societies. Each of his projects interrogates a combination of contemporary issues, historical developments, and theoretical problems to generate knowledge for the social sciences and humanities, to spur ethical reflection among practitioners, and to inform policy. 

His main line of research examines social, ethical, and policy issues that stem from uses of pathogen genomics and digital health infrastructures in infectious disease control programs. He maintains active projects focused on these topics in the US, Botswana, and global health policy: 

• In the US, his papers have tracked changes in how the US HIV/AIDS epidemic is managed using technologies of digital and genomic surveillance. This research has focused on how digital infrastructures and methods from pathogen genomic epidemiology have been implemented as part of routine public health practice, and then contested through policy initiatives, everyday practices of public health workers, and responses by actors in social movements, civil society, academia, and industry. Find relevant papers here, here, and here.

• In Botswana, he collaborates with a multidisciplinary group that conducts genomic epidemiology studies of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) and SARS-CoV-2 transmission in relation to HIV co-infection. He has led projects with this group that have received three grants – two NIH bioethics supplements and a pilot award from UTMB. These projects co-mobilize approaches from empirical bioethics, STS, and Implementation Science. Find relevant papers here and here.

• In global health policy, Stephen’s work mainly focuses on the social dimensions of the global scale-up of pathogen genomics in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, including in relation to media frames used to describe pathogen evolution. Find relevant papers here and here. He is also involved in a new collaboration focused on ethical issues related to clinical biocontainment and high-consequence pathogens.

Through his collaborations with the UTMB ITS and in pathogen genomics, Dr. Molldrem is working to develop novel styles of inquiry at the intersection of STS, Implementation Science, translational science, team science, and global health. By co-mobilizing each of these fields’ concerns, he aims to cultivate novel forms of engagement between STS and the health sciences.

Dr. Molldrem’s projects have been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS), UTMB Institute for Human Infections and Immunity, and other entities. He is a Co-Principal Investigator (Co-PI) of the NSF-funded “Knowledge of AIDS” Research Collaboration Network. From 2019-2021, he was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. In 2019, he received his PhD in American Culture with a Certificate of Graduate Studies in STS from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His doctoral research was supported by multiple fellowships and grants, including the Rackham Merit Fellowship.

From 2016-2019, he conducted ethnographic fieldwork in metropolitan Atlanta’s HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ health safety nets along with federal policy research about the digitization of the US healthcare system. He is working on several articles and a book project based on that research and subsequent studies. This work focuses mainly on the consequences of emphasizing surveillance-based solutions to health inequity in the US during the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, in the context of gross inequities. The project also argues for the importance of leveraging digital health systems to realize a future transition to a system of single-payer healthcare in the US.

Stephen is an engaged scholar involved in policy work in LGBTQ health, HIV/AIDS, and digital health with multiple stakeholder groups. He regularly participates in policy and ethics consultations on these topics.

His full CV can be found at this link.