Jacob D. Moses, Ph.D.

Historian of Medicine, Public Health, and Biotechnology · STS

Assistant Professor of Bioethics & Health Humanities

University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston

Jacob Moses’s research and teaching centers on the intersection of the history of medicine and public health, bioethics, and science & technology studies (STS). He studies biomedicine, public health, and biotechnology in the 20th and 21st centuries, with a particular focus on issues of ethics and governance. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Bioethics & Health Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

Dr. Moses is currently a principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded research project, “Collaborative Research: Behavioral Science and the Making of the Right-Reasoning Public Health Citizenry.”

His current book project, Medical Regret without Remorse, traces the history of therapeutic reversals in surgical practice from the mid-20th century to the present. In this research, he seeks to illuminate bureaucratic and affective responses to medical harm and develop a new account of how affect plays a role both among patients, medical professionals, and public health officials in shaping the current regime of biomedicine.

He received his Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard University (2020), where he also earned a secondary field in Science, Technology, and Society. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Medical Humanities and Social Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. His work has received support from the National Science Foundation, the E. J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and the Science History Institute (formerly Chemical Heritage Foundation).

Before pursuing his doctoral studies, he worked for several years at  The Hastings Center on interdisciplinary bioethics research and public outreach projects ranging from pandemic preparedness to the ethics of synthetic biology.

Recent Publications

• Article in Annals of Internal Medicine, “Unjust Discrimination Between Cisgender and Transgender Gender-Affirming Care.”
• Article in Hastings Center Report, “Gender-Affirming Care for Cisgender People.”
• Editor of special issue of Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, “Healthcare Practitioners’ Emotions and the Politics of Well-Being in Twentieth Century Anglo-America”
• Perspective in Washington Post, “An AI Moratorium Probably Is Not the Answer”
• Perspective in New England Journal of Medicine, “Obstacles to Physicians’ Emotional Health — Lessons from History”

For further details, please see CV.