Keisha S. Ray, PhD

Biography

Keisha Ray earned a PhD in philosophy from the University of Utah. She is currently an associate professor with tenure with the McGovern Center for Humanities & Ethics and serves as the Director of the McGovern Center’s Medical Humanities Scholarly Concentration as well as the Longitudinal Themes Director for McGovern Medical School. Before joining the McGovern Center, she was an assistant professor of philosophy at Texas State University, a postdoctoral fellow with the McGovern Center, a lecturer at various universities in Texas and Utah, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of South Carolina.

Most of Dr. Ray’s work focuses on the social, political, and cultural determinants of Black people’s health, integrating race education into medical school curricula, and the ethics of biomedical enhancement. She has contributed to peer-reviewed clinical, bioethics, and medical humanities journals like the Journal of Medical Humanities and Pediatrics, as well as edited volumes, and textbooks. Dr. Ray also serves as an associate editor of the American Journal of Bioethics blog site to which she is a regular contributor. She was also elected as a Hastings Center Fellow in 2024. Her book Black Health: The Social, Political, and Cultural Determinants of Black People’s Health was released in 2023 by Oxford University Press.