Philip L. Frana
Philip L. Frana is associate professor and director of undergraduate research in the Honors College at the University of Central Arkansas.
In addition to a wide variety of administrative duties, he coordinates effort on more than two hundred undergraduate research projects on the UCA campus each year. He teaches seminars on the Search for Self, the Search for Community, the Artificial Other (robotics, artificial intelligence, and society), Art & Technology, Oral History and the Study of Memory, the History of the Life Sciences, History of Medicine, History of Science, History of Engineering, Technology and the Law, Virtual Worlds and Online Communities, and Senior Seminars on Economic Globalization, Transhumanism, and Futuristics. He also teaches courses on research and writing across the disciplines.
Specialties
Frana's primary domains for teaching and research are science and technology studies, oral history, intellectual history, and technology in education. His publications are mainly in the history of medicine and public health, the history of computing, the history of expertise and the professions, and Honors education. He is currently working on a book manuscript documenting the history of health informatics called "Calculating Care: Evidence, Computers, and Medicine in the 20th Century."
Frana graduated with his bachelor's degrees in History and Economics from Wartburg College in 1991. He completed his master's and doctoral degrees in the History of Technology and Science at Iowa State University in 1999. He served as a National Science project director at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities from 2000-2004.
