Evelynn M. Hammonds, a specialist in the history of American medicine, public health and issues involving gender, race and science, has been selected to be the next holder of the Class of 1947 Career Development Professorship, Provost Mark S. Wrighton has announced.
Professor Wrighton said the selection reflects Professor Hammonds's "outstanding contributions in education and research." She has been named to a three-year term.
Dr. Hammonds is an assistant professor in the history of science in MIT's Program in Science, Technology and Society. She was co-organizer in 1994 with Professor Robin W. Kilson of the history section of the conference, Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Name-1984-1994. The conference, the first national meeting to focus on the special issues and scholarship of black women in higher education, brought more than 1,500 academics to MIT from across the nation.
Professor Hammonds received the BEE in electrical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and the BS in physics from Spelman College, both in 1976, the SM in physics from MIT in 1980 and the PhD in the history of science from Harvard University in 1993. Her dissertation was "The Search for Perfect Control: A Social History of Diphtheria, 1880-1930."
She joined the MIT faculty in 1992 and is currently on leave as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J.
Before joining the MIT faculty she was visiting assistant professor of the history of science at Hampshire College in Amherst.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on March 22, 1995.
