Elizabeth Semler is a fifth-year graduate student in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota. She is broadly interested in the intersections of public health, food (and food industries), and advertising in the twentieth century. Her project compares U.S. and Finnish government, medical community, and dairy industry responses to the diet–heart disease controversy from 1970 to 2000. It focuses on the ways in which American and Finnish dairy industries' organization, research, and promotional campaigns reveal the influence of politics, economics, and culture on industry's production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. It also explores if and how the relationship between political forces and economic policies shapes government responses to public health crises.
