Harriet A. Washington is a writer whose books include Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Experimentation with Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Infectious Madness: The Surprising Science of How We “Catch” Mental Illness, and the forthcoming Renaissance Men.  She lectures widely on history of medicine and medical ethics in the US and abroad and has held fellowships at Stanford University, Harvard Medical School, and elsewhere. She is a lecturer in Bioethics at Columbia University, co-chair of the History and Public Health Section of the New York Academy of Medicine and is widely published in both popular and peer-reviewed publications.

Her awards include the Congressional Black Caucus Beacon of Light Award, a slew of first prizes in investigative journalism, and awards from several  universities, including the 2025 University of Rochester President’s Award,   Columbia University’s  Mailman School of Public Health’s Public Health Leadership Award, and its 2020-21 Kenneth and  Mamie Clark Distinguished Lecture Award as well as  the American Medical Writers Association Walter C. Alvarez Award, the  National Book Critics Circle Nonfiction award, and a PEN award. She curates a feature-film series focused on history of medicine.