Kirsten Ostherr

About Me

Kirsten Ostherr is a media scholar & design thinker who specializes in health and medical visualizations: historical, present and future. She is a Professor of English at Rice University and, with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, she has recently completed a Master of Public Health degree at the University of Texas School of Public Health. Her work is focused on bringing media theory and health communication into a more powerful and beneficial engagement. Dr. Ostherr is especially interested in using new media technologies to enhance patient-centered care.

She is also the Director and co-founder of the Medical Futures Lab, a collaborative center dedicated to reimagining medicine at the intersection of humanity and technology. They’re busy inventing digital medical humanities, experimenting with collaborative participatory design projects, and training the next generation of digital doctors there.

Her most recent book, Medical Visions: Producing the Patient Through Film, Television, and Imaging Technologies, was published by Oxford University Press in March 2013. Medical Visions explores how audiovisual media – from x-rays to 16mm film to television and the Internet – have trained both physicians and patients to see and understand health and disease. The book covers the entire 20th century, and peeks into the 21st – it is historical and theoretical, and it is meant to provide a useful framework for current medical professionals, educators, communicators, start-ups, and students to learn from the past to make the future better.

Title: Professor 

Company/Affiliation: Rice University

Industry: Academia

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