Convocation Program 2025 single pages

UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR

KENNETH P. SERBIN, PhD

Kenneth Serbin’s contributions span the fields of Brazilian history, science and technology studies, and bioethics. His book, Secret Dialogues: Church-State

untreatable brain disorder, and the movement to conquer it. First writing under a pseudonym to avoid genetic discrimination, in 2012 Professor Serbin exited the “Huntington’s closet” by publishing an essay titled “Racing Against the Genetic Clock” in The Chronicle of Higher Education . In 2011, he was named the Person of the Year of the Huntington’s Disease Society of America.

Relations, Torture, and Social Justice in Authoritarian Brazil also appeared in a special Brazilian edition, receiving wide media coverage and a prize. His Needs of the Heart: A Social and Cultural History of Brazil’s Clergy and Seminaries also won a prize. From Revolution to Power in Brazil: How Radical Leftists Embraced Capitalism and Struggled with Leadership chronicled the lives of opponents of Brazil’s military dictatorship. Professor Serbin served as president of the Brazilian Studies Association. He has also documented the new and harrowing human experience of living in the gray zone between a genetic test result and onset of a disease. Since 2005, his blog, At Risk for Huntington’s Disease has chronicled his family’s struggle against Huntington’s, an

In 2017, Professor Serbin, his family and Huntington’s advocates from around the globe attended a special audience in Rome with Pope Francis, who declared Huntington’s “hidden no more.” For USD, Professor Serbin organized an exclusive screening of the documentary about the event, Dancing at the Vatican . His many courses include “A History of the Brain: Examining Huntington’s Disease.”