Why I’m a Scientist: Dr. Devaleena Das

Dr. Devaleena Das studies how knowledge about the body is produced, expanding what counts as evidence so science and medicine can better reflect the complexity of lived experience.

For Dr. Devaleena Das, Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Biobehavioral Health at the University of Minnesota Medical School, Duluth campus, science begins with a question: what counts as knowledge about the body, and who decides?

The Spark: Journey Into Science

“I didn’t arrive at science through a single ‘eureka’ moment in a lab,” Dr. Das recalls. “My entry point is in some ways, unsettling.”

That entry point came through early encounters with clinical spaces, where she observed “how certain bodies were listened to, measured, or dismissed.” She was struck by the authority given to data, but also by how incomplete data could feel when it did not account for lived experience, especially around gender, pain, and reproductive health.

“What stayed with me was this gap between what could be measured and what could be felt, narrated, or silenced,” Dr. Das said. “That gap felt like a scientific problem, not just a philosophical one.”

This realization shaped how she understands science. Dr. Das now sees science as “a much broader set of practices centered on inquiry, evidence-making, and interpretation.” Scientists, she says, help construct the frameworks that determine “what counts as a fact in the first place.”

The Drive: Motivation and Purpose

Dr. Das studies the body through Body Studies, medicine, feminist science studies, medical humanities, and social sciences. She moves between “archives, clinical guidelines, patient narratives, and policy documents,” treating them all as places where scientific knowledge is produced.

“I don’t treat qualitative narratives as ‘soft’ data,” she said. “I see them as critical evidence.”

Her motivation comes from the stakes of the work. “The questions I work on have material consequences for how human bodies are treated, diagnosed, and cared for,” Dr. Das said. In reproductive and gendered health, what counts as evidence can shape whether someone is believed, whether pain is acknowledged, or whether care is provided.

“Gaps in knowledge are not neutral,” she said. “They often map onto whose experiences are ignored or undervalued.” What keeps her going is her “dual commitment to rigor and to justice.”

The Impact: Discovery and Contribution

One of the contribution’s Dr. Das is most proud of is Anatomophilia, a framework that understands bodies as “multiple, dynamic, and lived, rather than fixed or singular.” Her book on the subject, titled Anatomophilia: The Liberation of the Body, will be published in November 2026.

A key moment came during field research with South Asian Indigenous queer communities, where she encountered ways of relating to the body that emphasized “continuity and euphoria,” rather than only dysphoria.

“What struck me was that this wasn’t theoretical for them; it was already being lived and practiced,” Dr. Das says. That experience affirmed that “expanding our frameworks of evidence can deepen, rather than diminish, scientific understanding.”

Dr. Das hopes her work helps medicine take lived experience more seriously. “If future clinicians are trained to see patient experience as data, not anecdote, that can change how diagnoses are made and how care is delivered,” she said. Still, Dr. Das cautions that valuing lived experience does not mean treating any single patient narrative as universally representative. “Individual experiences are an indispensable source of insight,” she noted, “but they must be understood in relation to broader patterns rather than assumed to speak for all bodies of all patients.”

The Future: Vision and Inspiration

Dr. Das finds hope in medical feminism, a field she sees “beginning to cohere” around questions of bodies, evidence, and care. She is encouraged by medical students who are “pushing for curricular changes,” including efforts to integrate narrative, question bias in clinical training, and advocate for more inclusive understandings of bodies.

Her advice to future scientists is to ask questions that do not fit neatly within disciplinary boundaries. “It might feel risky at times,” Dr. Das said, “but that’s also where new knowledge emerges.”

Says Dr. Das, “I’m a scientist because I study how knowledge about the body and health is produced, and I work to expand what counts as evidence so that science can better reflect the complexity of lived experience.”