Susan Craddock

Introduction

Susan Craddock, Ph.D., is a professor in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota.

Craddock’s research asks questions about what shapes patterns of infectious diseases and the responses to them. Central to her work is how scientific research, commercial interests, health needs, and government policies interact to contour who experiences particular diseases, why, and how. 

Craddock’s latest research for example looks, for example, at collaborations involved in what she calls humanitarian pharmaceutical production – that is, nonprofit organizations, university researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and funding agencies researching new tuberculosis drugs and vaccines for the first time in several decades. What scientific, ethical, and regulatory innovations are emerging from these collaborations, and what constitutes the opportunities and challenges of producing new therapies outside of typical profit-making incentives, form key questions of this work.

With a colleague, Craddock also looked at responses historically and currently to outbreaks of influenza, including controversies over global and national reactions to the recent H1N1 pandemic. Key points here were the variations in government response, the direct association between global inequality and vaccine access, evolving definitions of pandemic, and the growth of surveillance mechanisms for early detection.