Soraya de Chadarevian is Professor for History of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Department of History and the Institute for Society and Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles.  Her main area of interest is the history of the biomedical sciences in the twenty-first century up to the present. She has a background in biology and philosophy and among others has held fellowships at the Walther Rathenau Program and at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin; at La Villette and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris; at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research; at Churchill College Cambridge and at the Institute for Advances Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Before joining the faculty at UCLA, she was a senior research associate and affiliated lecturer in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge (1991-2006).

She is interested in the material and visual practices of the biomedical sciences and the place of these sciences in the broader culture as well as in historiographical issues. She has worked extensively on the history of molecular biology and the complex cultural processes that contributed to the development of the new science after World War II. Her publications on this topic include the monograph Designs for Life: Molecular Biology after World War II (Cambridge 2002; reprinted 2003; paperback 2011); the exhibition catalogue Representations of the Double Helix (Whipple Museum 2002), the co-edited volume Molecularizing Biology and Medicine: New Strategies and Alliances, 1910s-1970s (Harwood 1998) and numerous articles and book chapters. Other publications include the co-edited volume Models: The Third Dimension of Science (Stanford 2004), several guest-edited special issues, including more recently the co-edited issue Histories of Data and the Database, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (Dec 2018) as well as numerous articles. Her last book Heredity under the Microscope: Chromosomes and the Study of the Human Genome (Chicago 2020) is a history of chromosomes, visual evidence and the study of human heredity in the second half of the twentieth century (Chicago 2020). Her current research is on radioactive fallout and the first global pollutant.

She is Vice-President, President Elect of the History of Science Society (2024-2027).

Institutional website: https://history.ucla.edu/person/soraya-de-chadarevian/