Kirsten Ostherr is the Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She is a media scholar and health researcher, and author of Medical Visions: Producing the Patient through Film, Television and Imaging Technologies (2013) and Cinematic Prophylaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse of World Health (2005), and co-editor of Science/Animation (2016). She is the director and co-founder of the Medical Futures Lab. Her current research is on information and communication technologies in medicine, patient narratives, and the role of simulation as a mediator between human and technological forms of medical expertise.