Professor Evelynn M. Hammonds is the Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science, Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University.  This academic year she is the inaugural Audre Lorde Visiting Professor of Queer Studies at Spelman College.

Her research focuses on the history of scientific, medical and socio-political concepts of race, gender and sexuality in the histories of medicine, science and public health in the United States. At Harvard she served on the President’s Initiative on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery (2020-2022); the Faculty Executive Committee of the Peabody Museum and she chaired the University-wide Steering Committee on Human Remains in the Harvard Museum Collections.  She also works on projects to increase the participation of men and women of color in STEM fields. Currently she is the co-chair of the National Academy of Science (NAS) recently released report (December 9, 2021)  Transforming Technologies: Women of Color in Tech. Professor Hammonds is a member of the Committee on Women in Science, Engineering, and Medicine (CWSEM) of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the NAS Roundtable on Black Men and Black Women in Science, Engineering and Medicine. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  Prof. Hammonds is the current vice president/president-elect of the History of Science Society. She holds honorary degrees from Bates and Spelman Colleges.

She has been a member of the Harvard faculty since 2002 where she served as chair of the Department of the History of Science from 2017-2022 . 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 in Princeton.  She earned a Bachelor’s degree in physics from Spelman College, a Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech and the S.M. in Physics from MIT.  Prof. Hammonds was a member of the faculty at MIT from 1992 to 2002.