Graduated Harvard Medical School Class of 1996
Dr. Kathryn Hall is Associate Molecular Biologist and Assistant Professor in the Division of Preventive Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Director of Placebo Genetics in the Program in Placebo Studies at Harvard Medical School (HMS). After receiving her PhD in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from Harvard University she spent 10 years in the biotech industry tackling problems in drug discovery and development, first at Wyeth (now Pfizer) and then at Millennium Pharmaceuticals (now Takeda), where she became an Associate Director of Drug Development. Dr. Hall returned to HMS in 2010, joining the Fellowship in Integrative Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in 2012, and receiving a Master’s in Public Health from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2014. Dr. Hall was the 2015 Harvard Catalyst Program for Faculty Development and Diversity Inclusion (PFDD) faculty fellow and is the 2019 BWH Minority Faculty Career Development Awardee.
She was recently awarded a Radcliffe Exploratory Program grant which supported the groundbreaking Placebome in Clinical Trials and Medicine Conference in 2019. Her research has been the focus of numerous articles including features on BBC and in Science, The Atlantic, New York Times, The Economist and Discover magazines. Dr. Hall also has a Masters in Documentary Film from Emerson College.
“My goal was to get to industry, so I could, you know, make a company to employ Jamaicans, and we would, you know, become self-sufficient in this pharma industry in Jamaica.” (time)
“I was one of the founding members of MBSH, which is Minority Biomedical Scientists of Harvard.” (time)
“In the first meeting, they called all us graduate students together, I think there were about five of us in my class. And they said, they showed us a graph, and on it, it showed the enrollment, the PhD enrollment, like over the last, you know, 5 to 10 years. And they show it going up, up, up, up, up, and then it just plummets down. And they asked us if we had any idea why it would have plummeted down. And of course, it was exactly the year when Dr. Amos retired.” (time)
“I had registered for a conference here, and in line, and the person is checking me in, and they say to me, “Are you signing in for somebody else?” And I say to them, “What is it about me that makes you think I’m signing in for someone else?”” (time)
“And I thought wow, why don’t I do that, and do all the things I’ve ever wanted to do? And I made a list of the things that I always wanted to do in life, and they were, I always wanted to be a filmmaker, make a, you know, a film. I always wanted to renovate a house. I always wanted to write a book. I always wanted to have my own business.” (time)