Speaker Bios

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

Dr. Steven Kunkel is the Endowed Professor of Pathology Research and the Associate Dean of the Dean of the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan. He has been a member of the faculty since 1980. Dr. Kunkel is an internationally recognized expert is assessing the cellular and molecular mechanisms of disease. He has been awarded five United States patents and is currently the Associate Editor of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, the Senior Associate Editor of the American Journal of Pathology, and the Associate Editor of the Journal of Clinical Immunology.

David "Talib" McCullough, a former member of the Black Poetic Society, has hosted open mic poetry readings in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Cleveland where he currently hosts "Word is Life." He is a member of three MC crews: the Dialectic, E.P.O.D. and NAIAD and he currently working on his debut CD. Talib is an educational consultant to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and a major contributor to their Hip-Hop Educators' study guide and national workshops. McCullough graduated with a degree in Marine and environmental science from Hampton College in Virginia and presently serves as the Assistant Arts and Entertainment Editor for the Cleveland Call and Post.

Peter Ubel, MD was a member of the faculty at the world-renowned University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics and is now an Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan. His book, Pricing Life: Why It's Time for Health Care Rationing, has recently been published by MIT Press. Dr. Ubel's current research includes a series of studies exploring public attitudes toward health care rationing. He is also a studying patient and public attitudes regarding the quality of life of people with chronic disabilities and the implications for resource allocation.

Alice Wexler, is a Research Scholar at the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA. She is the author of three books, Emma Goldman in America (Beacon Books, 1984) Emma Goldman in Exile (Beacon, 1989) and most recently, Mapping Fate: A Memoir of Family, Risk, and Genetic Research (University of California Press, 1995). A Fulbirght Fellow to Venezuela in 1964-65, she returned there twice as part of the international collaborative research team studying Huntington's disease around Lake Maracaibo. In 1999 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her current work on a book about the social and cultural history of Huntington's disease in the nineteenth century.

Warren Lockette is a professor of Neurosurgery at the Wayne State University of Medicine, Detroit; an Adjunct Associate Professor of Physiology at the University of Michigan Medical School, Ann Arbor.