The past, present and future of contraception: speaker biographies
Kim is a PhD student at the department of History and Philosophy of Science here in Cambridge. She has long been fascinated by reproductive health, and her research interests focus on reproductive technologies, perceptions of fertility and gendered experiences of healthcare. Her PhD aims to construct the first large-scale historiography of contraception, and she relishes any opportunity to explain why she thinks this is important.
Aprajita Sarcar is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Centre de Sciences Humaines, New Delhi. She works on everyday governance of population in postcolonial India. She holds a PhD from the Department of History, Queen’s University, Canada. Her work is interdisciplinary and requires a combination of watching films (if not co-creating them), reading archival dust, talking to people, and triangulating how the three mount a multi-layered social reality. Dr Sarcar will be joining the Laureate Centre as a postdoctoral research fellow from July 2022.
Alice Pelton is the Founder of The Lowdown - the world's first review platform for contraception. She set up the platform after struggling with side effects from the pill as a teenager, and they are on a mission to help make contraception easier to choose and access. The Lowdown have collected over 5,000 real world reviews on every method and brand available in the UK, and have recently launched an expert consultation and prescriptions service.
Cara Delay is Professor of History at the College of Charleston. Her research analyzes women, gender, and culture in Ireland, the American South, and the Atlantic World, with a particular focus on the history of reproduction. Her award-winning body of scholarship includes three books and more than 30 peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters. Her new book (co-authored with Beth Sundstrom), Catching Fire: Women’s Health Activism in Ireland, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press, and another project, Menstruation: A Global History, is under contract with Polity Press.
Beth Sundstrom, Ph.D., M.P.H. is an associate professor of communication and public health at the College of Charleston, South Carolina USA where she is the Director of the Women’s Health Research Team (WHRT) and the recipient of the 2018 William V. Moore Distinguished Teacher-Scholar Award. She conducts applied research that informs the development of community-based public health interventions and nationally recognized communication campaigns. Dr. Sundstrom is a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Research Grant recipient and leading expert on health communication, social marketing, and women’s health. She is the author of Reproductive Justice and Women’s Voices: Health Communication across the Lifespan (2015) and co-author of Birth Control: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2020) and the forthcoming Catching Fire: Women’s Health Activism in Ireland (Oxford University Press), along with more than 60 peer-reviewed publications in such outlets as Social Science & Medicine, Contraception, and the Journal of Health Communication.
Stefanie Felsberger is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Gender Studies at Cambridge University. Her research focuses on fertility tracking applications and asks how women in Egypt and Austria navigate the commodification of personal data to question conceptions of gender and labour in surveillance capitalism, data ownership and commodification. Before she worked as Bartlett Fellow at the Access to Knowledge for Development Center at the American University in Cairo. Her work looked at access and control of data, and the political economy of data, and surveillance theory. Stefanie studied Political Science and Arabic Studies at the University of Vienna.
Elena Rueda Carrasco’s background stems from Biomedical Sciences and Epigenetics, followed by her Master’s degree from Imperial College London in Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Management. Combining the knowledge of both disciplines, Elena has worked in business operations, consulting, and project management for a London based consultancy, a multinational health and social care provider, and Merck KGaA’s Innovation Centre. Fascinated by the healthcare start-up ecosystem, Elena has worked with several HealthTech start-ups in the fields of clinical trial recruitment systems, drug formulations, fertility and FemTech. Elena is also a freelance copywriter, and the Co-founder and CEO of Dama Health – a FemTech company focused on offering women and clinicians personalised contraception recommendations through our bespoke screening tests and pharmacogenetic science.
Aaron Lazorwitz, MD, is board certified in obstetrics and gynecology and earned his Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Johns Hopkins University. He then went to medical school at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and completed his residency at the University of Colorado. He remained at the University of Colorado for his fellowship in family planning and also received a master’s in clinical science from the University of Colorado during that time. Dr Lazorwitz also spends a large portion of his time involved in research activities and is interested in better understanding how genetic differences influence hormonal contraception. To push his research towards real world applications, he helped to co-found Dama Health and currently serves as its Chief Medical Officer.