Long Covid & Society

Speaker Bios

Larry Au is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The City College of New York, CUNY. His research examines the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in the production of biomedical knowledge, and asks how clinicians and scientists can better serve their patients and the public. Part of this work examines the globalization of precision medicine—or the use of genomics and other forms of big data to improve diagnosis and treatment—as a policy idea and scientific project, focusing primarily on its rise in China. Another part of this research looks at the politics of expertise around chronic and complex conditions, in particular, the experience of patients as they navigate uncertainties around their condition. 

Andre Luiz Sica de Campos is Professor of Public Policy at the Faculty of Applied Sciences at the University of Campinas. He holds a degree in Economics from the State University of Campinas (1993), a master’s degree in Science and Technology Policy from the State University of Campinas (1999), and a doctorate in Science and Technology Policy Studies from the Science Policy Research Unit – SPRU, University of Sussex, United Kingdom (2007). He completed postdoctoral studies at the Centre for Research in Innovation Management at the University of Brighton and at Research Councils UK, both in the United Kingdom (2008/2009), and he was a Faculty Fellow at Brighton Business School (University of Brighton – United Kingdom 2012-2014).

JD Davids is a transgender and queer chronically ill and disabled strategist, storyteller and organizer working with national networks of people living with HIV, Long COVID, ME/CFS and other infection-associated chronic conditions. He is a member of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, is a patient peer reviewer for the British Medical Journal and has served as an advisor to NIH, CDC, and state and local health departments. He writes and hosts conversations for the Cranky Queer Guide to Chronic Illness and is a member of the iconic What Would an HIV Doula Do collective. Davids was a longtime member of ACT UP Philadelphia and the founding executive director of CHAMP, a national mobilization force on HIV prevention justice, as well as co-founder of Long COVID Justice. Currently, he is in the Biography and Memoir program at City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, writing a memoir and conducting research on patient-led social movements, disability justice and sexual liberation.

Abigail A. Dumes is a medical anthropologist and associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Divided Bodies: Lyme Disease, Contested Illness, and Evidence-Based Medicine and was a member of National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Examining the Working Definition for Long COVID. She is currently the co-principal investigator on a mixed methods study on Long COVID, work, and disability among University of Michigan-Ann Arbor faculty and staff.

Gil Eyal is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Trust Collaboratory at Columbia University. He works in a broad field, which encompasses sociological research on science, medicine, professions, intellectuals and knowledge, especially as these intersect with political and legal institutions. He calls this the sociology of expertise, because this term does not prejudge who or what is included within the field. He is interested in what scientists and professionals do, but also in how ordinary people as “lay experts” put together novel forms of expertise.

Renan Gonçalves Leonel da Silva is a Research Associate at the Leir Research Institute for Business, Technology, and Society within the Martin Tuchman School of Management at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). He also serves as a Research Fellow in the Center for Ethics and Responsible Research at the same institution. He is a Co-PI at CoProExpert and leads the Trust in Autonomous Labs project housed at the Trust Collaboratory at Columbia University.

Emily Lim Rogers is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Her first book, Sick Work: Exhaustion, Labor, and Invisible Illness is forthcoming from Duke University Press (September 2026). The book examines myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and argues that the US healthcare system, alongside institutions of work and the state, mean that being ill takes invisible labor that in turn invisibilize people with chronic illnesses.

Ilana Löwy (she/her) is a senior researcher emerita at INSERM (The French National Institute of Health and Medical Research). Trained as a biologist, she then retrained as a historian of science and medicine.  Her main research topics are past and present relationships between laboratory sciences, clinical medicine, and public health. She published recently  Imperfect Pregnancies: A History of Birth Defects and Prenatal Diagnosis (JHUP, 2017), Tangled Diagnoses, Women, Prenatal Testing and Risk (Chicago UP, 2018), and Viruses and Reproductive Injustice: Zika in Brazil (JHUP, 2024). She now studies Long Covid in France and Brazil from a historical and sociological perspective.

Emily Mendenhall is an anthropologist, Guggenheim Fellow, and Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She has authored six books, including Syndemic Suffering (2012), Global Mental Health (2015), Rethinking Diabetes (2019), Unmasked (2022), Savoring Care (2025) and Invisible Illness (2026). She serves as Editor-in-Chief of a new publication, Science Politics, and has written for Scientific American, Vox, and Psychology Today.

Pierre Robicquet joined the CSI as a postdoctoral fellow in May 2025. He is involved in the CoProExpert project (Emergent Diseases, Patient Activism, and the Co-Production of Expertise) coordinated by Gil Eyal (Columbia University) and Madeleine Akrich (Mines Paris PSL). As part of the project, he contributes to studying the emergence of Long Covid and the process of its medical, scientific, and institutional recognition in France, the United States, and Brazil. At the intersection of the sociology of expertise, work, and organizations, Pierre’s work focuses on the processes surrounding knowledge construction, the stabilization of networks of actors, and transformations in healthcare organizations. For his Ph.D. thesis, which he completed in 2024 at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, he examined the networking of mental health organizations and its implications for public psychiatry.

David Scales MPhil, MD, PhD is an internal medicine hospitalist and assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medicine whose sociology, epidemiology, and internal medicine training provides an interdisciplinary foundation to studying how structural factors shape health information environments and allow misinformation to take hold. Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative methods, he translates across academic, clinical, and public spheres to build community-based interventions against health misperceptions, developing “community-oriented motivational interviewing” and publishing in venues ranging from the New England Journal of Medicine to Nature Human Behavior, WBUR and the Columbia Journalism Review. His clinical and research interests center underserved populations, including those marginalized by the structure of the US healthcare system.

Melina Sherman, Ph.D. is a critical medical anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Central Florida. Her work focuses on the social and cultural construction of health disasters. Melina has a (relatively) new book titled, “How We Hurt: The Politics of Pain in the Opioid Epidemic” out from Oxford University Press and has published her research on health and illness in times of crisis in both academic and public-facing outlets. She is currently working on a new book project, tentatively titled, “Invisibilized: Long Covid and the (Un)Making of Crisis.”

Kathryn (Kat) Varga is a public health professional with experience leading the implementation and evaluation of clinical care solutions and healthcare technology platforms. Leveraging her background in biostatistics and science communication, Kat deploys a mixed methods approach to programmatic support and sustainment. Currently, Kat is a Senior Healthcare Consultant supporting the implementation of VA’s IRB management system, VAIRRS. She has been navigating life with Long COVID-related Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) since 2021.

Julia Moore Vogel is an Assistant Professor and Senior Program Director at Scripps Research as well as a Contributor at the Patient Led Research Collaborative. She is using her more than five years of lived experience with Long COVID and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis to conduct research that aims to address Long COVID and other infection-associated chronic conditions. She is also the co-Principal Investigator for The Participant Center of the All of Us Research Program. She previously managed genomics initiatives at the New York Genome Center and The Rockefeller University. She has a PhD in Computational Biology and Medicine and an MBA both from Cornell. 

Yanze Yu is a Ph.D. student and Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. He is also a research fellow at The Trust Collaboratory, The Center on Organizational Innovation, and a Precision Medicine & Society Fellow at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. His research lies at the intersection of medicine, science and technology studies, and political economy, with a broad focus on the social processes of medicalization. In particular, he is interested in embodiment and valuation within pharmaceuticalization. His work examines a wide range of conditions, including tics (Tourette’s syndrome, TikTok Tics), ADHD, rare diseases, and Long COVID.