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Our Mission

The Program on Race, Science and Society (PRSS) is an initiative at the University of Pennslyvania devoted to transformative and interdisciplinary approaches to the role of race in scientific research and biotechnological innovations, aiming both to promote social justice and to dispel the myth that race is a natural division of human beings.

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PRSS Director Dorothy Roberts was named a 2024 MacArthur Fellow

 Professor Roberts is a legal race scholar and public policy researcher "exposing racial inequities embedded in social service systems and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them. 

LEARN MORE ABOUT HER WORK AND THE MACARTHUR FELLOWSHIP

Upcoming Events



Book Talk: Policing Patients: Treatment and Surveillance on the Frontlines of the Opioid Crisis

Professor Dorothy Roberts, Professor Elizabeth Chiarello
- | | Making Worlds Cooperative Bookstore & Social Center
210 S 45th St, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Sociologists Elizabeth Chiarello and Dorothy Roberts discuss Chiarello’s Policing Patients: Treatment and Surveillance on the Frontlines of the Opioid Crisis, a book that…

PRSS Videos

PRSS Director Dorothy Roberts discusses the history, myths, and harms of race-based medicine in herTEDTalk: The Problem with Race-based Medicine, November 20, 2015. The talk was part of the 2015 TEDMED session called “Who Cares for Health Care?” that highlighted surprising perspectives and under-appreciated challenges facing our health care system. 

Click here to view the video of this talk and videos of other PRSS events
Penn Medicine and The Afterlives of Slavery Project

Given that Penn Medical School was the first of its kind in colonial America, the University of Pennslyvania has a special responsibility to not only uncover its relationship to enslavement but to lead other institutions in similar efforts. 

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