Laura Stark is assistant professor of Science in Society, and of Sociology at Wesleyan University, and is also an associate of the College of the Environment at the university. She completed a Stetten Fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in 2010, and is continuing her research on NIH as a Special Volunteer at the Office of NIH History.

Stark works on medicine, morality, and the modern state. Her first book, Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research (in press), explores how rules for the treatment of “human subjects” were formalized in the United States in the decades after World War II, and how these rules play out within Institutional Review Boards today. She is currently working on a second book, The Life of the Clinic. The book traces the everyday experiences of federal prisoners, conscientious objectors, college students, and religious volunteers who served as “normal controls” in the NIH research hospital during the 1950s and 1960s.

Stark earned a Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University (2006), and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Program in Science in Human Culture at Northwestern University (2006-2008), and in the Office of NIH History at the National Institutes of Health (2008-2010). She joined the faculty at Wesleyan in 2009.