James Colgrove

James Colgrove is an associate professor in the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. His research examines the relationship between individual rights and the collective well-being and the social, political, and legal processes through which public health policies have been mediated in American history.

Colgrove is the author of State of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination in Twentieth-Century America, co-author, with Amy Fairchild and Ronald Bayer, of Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America, and co-editor, with Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner, of The Contested Boundaries of American Public Health. His articles have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, Science, Health Affairs, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics. From 2005 through 2007 he was a Greenwall Foundation Faculty Scholar in Bioethics. His research has also been supported by grants from the National Library of Medicine, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Colgrove earned a B.A. from the University of California, Davis, an M.A. from San Francisco State University, and an M.P.H. and Ph.D. from Columbia University.