Barnard College Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Rebecca Jordan-Young '86 has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her study of the reciprocal relations between science and the social hierarchies of gender, sexuality, class, and race.
Jordan-Young will be returning to Bryn Mawr College for Reunion Weekend 2016 to participate in "Gender Equity in a New Century," an alumnae panel moderated by Professor Sharon Ullman. The panel will take place on Friday, May 27.
Since graduating from Bryn Mawr with a bachelor's degree in political science, Jordan-Young has trained in fields ranging from cognitive and development neuroscience, developmental biology, and physical chemistry to cultural anthropology, political science, history, and sociology. She has a Ph.D. in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University. An interdisciplinary feminist scientist and an accomplished writer, her work has been featured in Science, Nature, BMJ, American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB), Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, The American Journal of Public Health, Neuroethics, Social Science and Medicine, S&F Online, and other scholarly journals as well as popular outlets like The New York Times, Discover Magazine, The Guardian, and New Scientist.
Her work focuses on how steroid hormones shape the human brain. "I am intrigued (which is to say, obsessed)," Jordan-Young says, "with testosterone: its diverse physical capacities, its rich social life under the guise of 'the male sex hormone,' and the way these two realms co-produce knowledge about this overburdened steroid." She has written a book about the subject, Brain Storm: The flaws in the science of sex differences, published by Harvard University Press in 2010.