Melina Sherman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Public Knowledge. Her work centers on the social and cultural construction of disasters, namely public health crises such as the ongoing U.S. opioid epidemic and COVID-19. Melina is currently working on a book about the cultural and institutional politics of pain in the opioid crisis, titled, How it Hurts: Culture, Markets, and Pain in the U.S. Opioid Epidemic. Her work has appeared in a number of communication and social science journals, including Public Culture, Communication, Culture & Critique, and the International Journal of Communication. She earned her Ph.D. in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California.