Dorothy Roberts to Receive APA’s 2015 Fuller Award

The American Psychiatric Association has named George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology Dorothy Roberts as the recipient of the 2015 Solomon Carter Fuller Award in recognition of her demonstrated leadership and exceptional achievements. The award honors “a Black citizen who has pioneered in an area which has significantly benefitted the quality of life for Black people.”

Roberts is an acclaimed scholar of race, gender, and the law who joined the University in 2012 as its 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor. Her appointment is shared between the School of Law and the Departments of Sociology and Africana Studies in Penn Arts and Sciences. She is also the founding director of Penn’s Program on Race, Science, and Society.

Roberts’ path-breaking work explains the mechanisms and consequences of racial inequities for women, children, families, and communities and counters scientific misunderstandings about racial identity. Her research focuses on family, criminal and civil-rights law; bioethics; child welfare; feminist theory; reproductive justice; critical race theory; and science and society.

Her major books include Fatal Intervention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-first Century; Sex, Power, and Taboo: Gender and HIV in the Caribbean and Beyond; Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare; and Killing The Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty.

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