Makini Chisolm-Straker

Makini Chisolm-Straker, MD MPH is the 2023-24 Argiro Fellow in the Study of Modern Slavery at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of History at Yale University. Just prior to this position, she was a White House Fellow appointed to the Office of the Commissioner at the Social Security Administration. There her portfolio included disability justice, economic mobility, housing (in)security, and racial and gender equity work. She has served in Africa, Southwest Asia, the Caribbean, Central America, and the U.S. as an emergency medicine physician and has engaged in invisible populations public health research. A leader in U.S. trafficking response efforts, Dr. Chisolm-Straker has co-edited two seminal textbooks on U.S.-based labor and sex trafficking and helped develop the country’s public health framing of anti-trafficking action. Dr. Chisolm-Straker is exploring how structural reparations can eliminate system-based precarity and her Spring 2024 course is entitled, “Precarity as policy: A U.S. history of structural inequity.”