Teaching & Learning Discussion: Community-Engaged Pedagogy

Ayah Nuriddin

Ayah Nuriddin is Assistant Professor in the History of Medicine with a secondary appointment in the Program on Ethnicity, Race, and Migration (ER&M). She is a historian of medicine and biology with particular interests in the histories of eugenics, racial science, scientific racism, reproduction, and human subjects research.

Nuriddin is currently at work on her first book tentatively entitled “Seed and Soil: Black Eugenic Thought in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.” It examines how African Americans navigated questions of racial science, eugenics, and hereditarianism in relation to struggles for racial justice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also analyzes the complex and often paradoxical ways that African Americans imagined the utility of racial science and eugenics for challenging scientific racism and advocating for racial equality. It will also trace how the ongoing legacies of racial science continue to shape African American articulations of racial formation and health disparities.

Nuriddin’s research has been supported by the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHSTM) and the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute (AGHI) at Johns Hopkins University. She was an inaugural inductee of the Johns Hopkins University chapter of the Edward Bouchet Graduate Honor Society. Her work has been published in Historical Studies of Natural Science, the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, and the Lancet. She has appeared on the Disability History Association podcast and American History TV on C-Span.

Prior to arriving at Yale, she was a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows, and Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and African American Studies at Princeton University. She received her PhD in the History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins University. She also holds an MA in History and an MLS from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a BA in International Relations and History from American University.

Paul Tipton

Paul Tipton, Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, is an experimental particle physicist specializing in collider physics. He is a member of the ATLAS collaboration where he is currently studying the properties of the Higgs boson.  He is also leading the effort at Yale to construct part of the HL-LHC ATLAS tracker in Wright Lab.   As a member of the CDF collaboration, Tipton played a leading role in the discovery of the top quark.   He has been a member of the Physics Advisory Committee at Fermilab and the Science Policy Committee at SLAC.  After coming to Yale in 2006, he served as Director of Graduate Studies 2010-2013 and Chair of the Physics Department (2013-2019).

Sophie Edelstein

Sophie Edelstein is a postgraduate research fellow in the Section of the History of Medicine and the Department of Anesthesiology at the Yale School of Medicine. A New Haven native and graduate of New Haven Public Schools, she holds degrees in Cellular & Molecular Biology and History of Medicine from Yale College, as well as an MPH in Social & Behavioral Sciences from the Yale School of Public Health.

With the Community Histories Lab, Edelstein leads collaborative projects that examine local histories at the intersection of race, disability, gender, and sexuality. Her current historical work focuses on community mental health through the lens of the Black Power Movement in New Haven, advancing the framework of “history as harm reduction” to better understand how historical trauma shapes present-day community health needs.



Edelstein's deep roots in New Haven inform her approach to community-engaged scholarship. From curating community history exhibits to leading neighborhood walking tours for medical residents and staff with the Office of Health Equity Research, Edelstein works to bridge institutional and community knowledge, emphasizing how understanding past harms is essential for developing meaningful approaches to community care.