Keith Wailoo is professor of history and health policy, jointly appointed in the Department of History and the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research, at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Wailoo is also director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University.

He has devoted much of his career to the study of the cultural politics of health, disease, and medicine in America, with a particular focus on issues of race and ethnicity, inequalities, and disparities in experience and medical care. Before joining the Rutgers faculty in July 2001, he taught for nine years at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Department of History and in the Department of Social Medicine (School of Medicine).

His books include The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine: Ethnicity and Innovation in Tay-Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis, Sickle Cell Disease, coauthored with Stephen Pemberton (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). He is coeditor, with Julie Livingston and Peter Guarnaccia, of A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, the Bungled Transplant, and Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), a retrospective analysis of the death of an undocumented immigrant girl at Duke University Medical Center in 2003 because of a mismatched heart-lung transplant, and of the links between this case and broader issues in contemporary health policy—from error and malpractice to immigration and the regulation of the organ transplant system.

Wailoo's second book, Dying in the City of the Blues, received numerous awards including the 2002Lillian Smith Book Award for nonfiction, presented by the Southern Regional Council; the 2005 William H. Welch Medal for best book, presented by the American Association for the History of Medicine; the 2002 Susanne Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship; the 2002 American Political Science Association Award for best book published in the area of public policies, social and legal dimensions of ethnic and racial politics in the United States from the Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics; and the 2006 Community Service Award from the Sickle Cell/Thalassemia Patient Network. It  was designated an Honor Book by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities in 2003. Dr. Wailoo’s first book, Drawing Blood, received the Arthur Viseltear Award from the American Public Health Association in 1996.

Dr. Wailoo received his PhD in the history and sociology of science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, and he holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Yale University (1984).