Trisha Paul is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, Divisions of Hematology and Oncology and Palliative Care, and the Department of Health Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester. She holds an MFA in creative writing from NYU and completed subspecialty training at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. As a researcher, she studies writing and storytelling interventions for children with cancer, their families, and their care teams. She is a Field Notes Editor for Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and her writing has appeared in medical journals such as JAMA and anthologies such as Where It Hurts: Dispatches from the Emotional Frontlines of Medicine.

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Larry Guttmacher is a Professor Emeritus of Clinical Psychiatry and Health Humanities and Bioethics. At various times, his Rochester career has included two tours as Residency Director in Psychiatry, time as the Biopsychosocial Medicine course director, time as one of the original Advisory Deans in the medical school, and service as the Clinical Director at the Rochester Psychiatric Center. He suffers from a previously undescribed genetic disorder where many members of his family end up as psychiatrists, hence the HHBE Grand Rounds.

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Emma Pierson is the Zhang Family Endowed Professor and assistant professor of computer science at Berkeley, and core faculty in the Computational Precision Health program. She develops data science and machine learning methods to study inequality and healthcare. Her work has been recognized by best paper, poster, and talk awards, an NSF CAREER award, a Rhodes Scholarship, Hertz Fellowship, Rising Star in EECS, MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35, Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science, AI2050 Early Career Fellowship, and Samsung AI Researcher of the Year. Her research has been published in venues including Nature, Science, JAMA, The New England Journal of Medicine, PNAS, ICML and NeurIPS, and she has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, and various other publications

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Pablo F. Gómez is Professor of Medical History and History in the Department of Medical History and Bioethics, and the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Gómez is interested in histories of health, the human body, material practices, and knowledge-making about the natural world in the early modern world, with a particular focus on the histories of Latin America, the Caribbean, and the African diaspora. Gómez's new book, Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave and the Invention of the Modern Corporeality, is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press (June 2026). The book examines how, through their material practices, Iberian Atlantic slave trading communities made human corporeality articulable with a new set of ideas about finance, facts, objectivity, and measurable risk that emerged in the early modern era. He’s the author of multiple articles, chapters, and two other books. His first monograph, The Experiential Caribbean, won the 2019 Welch Medal and the 2018 Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize. He also coedited The Gray Zones of Medicine, a volume that explores the history of health practices in Latin America from the 16th to the 21st century through the biographies of unlicensed healers. The recipient of grants from a variety of US and international institutions, he is currently working on an NEH-sponsored project that explores the imagination of new histories of disease, value, bodies, labor, and subjectivity in the Caribbean, as well as the history of materiality in the framing of medical histories in Iberian Atlantic and Mediterranean spaces.

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Sarah Handley-Cousins is an associate teaching professor of History at the University at Buffalo, where she teaches courses on US History, disability, medicine, gender, and war. Her first book, Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North, was published in 2019 by the University of Georgia Press and received the 2020 Outstanding Book award from the Disability History Association. She is the executive editor of the digital publication Nursing Clio, and with the rest of the editorial team, she published The Nursing Clio Reader with Rutgers University Press in 2025. She is the president of the Disability History Association and, until June 2026, served as Secretary of the American Association for the History of Medicine.

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By the latter half of the nineteenth century, syphilis had become one of France’s most prominent public health crises. The disease notably posed a visual problem: its observable symptoms were unpredictable, ephemeral, and mimicked those of other illnesses. This markedly troubled relationship to visuality, my research argues, helped cultivate an attitude towards the visual field for physicians and the broader public alike. This talk explores how this visual attitude shaped and was shaped by modern art and medicine.

Kathleen Pierce is Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at Smith College. Her research explores histories of health, science, and medicine as they intersect with art and visual culture in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French empire. Her book, A Cutaneous History of Modernism: From Dermatology's Formalisms to Cubism's Body Politics, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. Recent writing has appeared in journals and edited volumes including Histoire, Médecine et Santé [History, Medicine and Health], Representations, and Art & the Critical Medical Humanities.

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