Kirsten Ostherr, PhD, MPH is the Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English at Rice University, in Houston, Texas, where she is a media scholar, health researcher, and founding director of the Medical Humanities program. She is the author of Medical Visions: Producing the Patient through Film, Television and Imaging Technologies (Oxford, 2013) and Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health (Duke, 2005), co-editor of Science/Animation, a special issue of the journal Discourse (2016), and editor of Applied Media Studies (Routledge, 2018). Her current research is on information and communication technologies in medicine, patient narratives, trust and privacy in digital health ecosystems, and the role of simulation as a mediator between human and technological forms of medical expertise. Her current book project is called Quantified Health: Learning from Patient Stories in the Age of Big Data. She is Director of the Medical Futures Lab and has spoken to audiences at the White House, the World Health Organization, the National Library of Medicine, TEDx, the mHealth Summit, Medicine X, the Louisville Innovation Summit, the Bauhaus, and universities and conferences worldwide.
