Evelynn Hammonds, PhD, SM, BEE

Chair, Department of the History of Science; Professor of History of Science and of African and African-American Studies, Harvard University

Professor Evelynn M. Hammonds is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science and Professor of African and African American Studies. She has been on the Harvard faculty for 19 years where she currently serves as chair of the Department of the History of Science.  She earned her Ph.D. in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. She has an undergraduate degree in physics from Spelman College and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech. She earned the S.M. in Physics from MIT.  She also taught at MIT for 10 years in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society.  Her research focuses on the history of scientific, medical and socio-political concepts of race and gender in the United States. At Harvard she currently serves on the university-wide committee to examine Harvard’s relationship to slavery; the Faculty Executive Committee of the Peabody Museum and she chairs the Steering Committee on Human Remains in the Harvard Museum Collections.  She also works on projects to improve the representation of men and women of color in STEM fields. She is a member of the Committee on Women In Science, Technology, and Medicine (CWSEM) of the National Academy of Sciences. She was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2018 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.

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