MAKE MY PSA CONTEST

STEVEN W. THRASHER holds the inaugural Daniel Renberg Chair at Northwestern's Medill School, the first journalism professorship anywhere to focus on LGBTQ research. He is also on the faculty of Northwestern's Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing.

An interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Thrasher is an internationally recognized expert on race, social epidemiology, and the criminalization of disease who has addressed universities and medical institutions around the world. In 2020, he served as a national surrogate to presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders, advising the campaign on its healthcare policies. He has written about the HIV/AIDS, Covid-19, and monkeypox epidemics for the New York Times. Guardian, Atlantic, and BuzzFeedNews, as well as in numerous scholarly journals.

His first book, The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide, was published in August 2022 by Celadon Books and Macmillan Publishing to wide acclaim. The book was on "best of" lists from Apple, Amazon, USA Today, Kirkus Reviews, New York magazine and Publishers Weekly. The Viral Underclass was also a longlist finalist for both the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, and won Best in Literature from the POZ Awards for its depiction of HIV/AIDS. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies and tweets @thrasherxy.