Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, Ph.D.

Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, Ph.D., is a historian of medicine and science who focuses on cases in African countries. She received her A.B. and Ph.D. from the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, where she concentrated on the history of medicine with her primary adviser, Allan Brandt. She grew up in Ghana and the United States and became interested in the history behind the health disparities she observed within her family. She studies the ways that communities share medical and scientific knowledge over time and how differential access to knowledge shapes global health.

“Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa” (Chicago, 2014), her first book, examines efforts of drug companies, African scientists, healers and rural communities to transform six plants into pharmaceuticals. It received several awards including the Herskovits Prize for the best book in English in African studies and the American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch Book Prize.

Her current project is a book and documentary film about Ghana’s medical isotopes and nuclear energy program, “Atomic Junction: Nuclear Power in Africa after Independence” (under contract with Cambridge University Press).

Her research in Ghana, South Africa and Madagascar has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, and the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT. Formerly, she taught at the University of California at Berkeley, where she was an affiliate of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine in the School of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco. She serves on the editorial board of Endeavour.

Visit Osseo-Asare’s faculty page to view her full CV and see courses she offers on the history of disease, pharmaceuticals, textiles and migration. She is an affiliate of the Medicine and Society Program in the Department of Sociology.