Marcia Meldrum, Ph.D.

Dr. Marcia L. Meldrum received her PhD in the history of Science and Medicine from SUNY Stony Brook in 1995. At UCLA, she has applied her expertise in oral history and other qualitative methods to study health services, as well as medical history. She is the Co-Director of the John C. Liebeskind History of Pain Collection at the Louise M.
Darling Biomedical Library in the Geffen School of Medicine, which is considered to be one of the leading archival and oral history collections in contemporary biomedicine in the country. She was the lead researcher on an NIMH-funded qualitative study of children with chronic pain 2002-07, which will continue with new funding under Center auspices and a collaborating investigator on the Oral History of Human Genetics, based at the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics. At the Center, Dr. Meldrum has collaborated on oral history and archival projects on the history of mental health services in LA County, the history of neuropsychopharmacology, and the problem of evidence-based evaluation of pharmaceuticals in a market economy. Her particular research interests are processes through which social, cultural, and economic factors shape diagnostic and therapeutic practices. Her published work has appeared in JAMA, the British Medical Journal, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, The Oxford Textbook of Clinical Research Ethics, and the Journal of Pain.