ABOUT
Dr. Melissa Creary
Melissa Creary, PhD, MPH is an Associate Professor of Health Management and Policy and Global Health at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. She is also Co-founder of the Collaborative for Transformative Public Health (CTPH), Co-Director of Blue Cross Blue Shield sponsored Collaborative Quality Initiative: Michigan Social Health Interventions to Eliminate Disparities (MSHIELD) and Senior Advisor of Public Health, Policy, and Equity at the American Thrombosis and Hemostasis Network (ATHN). She received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies (focusing on Health, History, and Culture) at the Graduate Institute for the Liberal Arts (ILA) and Master’s in Public Health at Emory University. With over 25 years of experience, she has dedicated her career to the sickle cell and bleeding disorder communities in roles as a scientist, policy maker, and interdisciplinary researcher. A globally sought-after speaker, she has addressed topics such as justice & equity in health and biomedicine in over 10 countries and at prestigious institutions like Columbia University, Fiocruz, Brown University, University of Lisbon, and Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Creary’s research has been published in leading journals, including Social Science and Medicine, JAMA Open Network and The American Journal of Bioethics.
Dr. Creary’s primary research interests include how science, culture, and policy intersect, particularly around ethical, legal, and social concerns (ELSI). She uses historical, anthropological, and public health methods to create a body of research that centers community voice and helps us understand society’s commitments to justice, science, and belonging – and uses sickle cell disease as a case to investigate simultaneous constructions of race and science via the development of policy. Her anti-racist research also theorizes how embodied outcomes of accumulated injustice and exclusion inhibit the receipt of justice even via well-meaning programs, policies, and technologies designed to build equity. She has brought her commitments to social justice in health to the boards and advisory councils of 500 Women Scientists, the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America, the Worldwide Initiative on Social Studies of Hemoglobinopathies, Sickle Cell Prodigy, and the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S).
Dr. Creary’s Affiliations
The Weight of Knowledge: How living with sickle cell shapes Melissa Creary’s mission for health justice
“I can see how the more I was willing to talk about my own story attached to some of the research questions I had, that it made a different kind of impact, and that people wanted to be able to humanize science in particular kinds of ways,”
-Dr. Melissa Creary
