Professor Goan is a specialist in twentieth century US history, with
specific interests in gender, Appalachia/Kentucky, and medical
history.  Her first book  Mary Breckinridge: The Frontier Nursing
Service and Rural Health in Appalachia (University of North Carolina
Press), was published in 2008.  She is now working on a project
investigating the private and professional lives of Lillian Morgan and
Isabel Morgan Mountain.  The wife and the daughter of a Nobel-prize
winning geneticist, Morgan and Mountain were both important scientists
in their own rights.  Lilian Morgan raised four children while also
conducting independent genetic research.  She made several
breakthroughs concerning sex-linked chromosomes through her work with
female fruit flies.  Following in her parents’ footsteps, Isabel
Morgan earned a Ph.D. in bacteriology.  She joined a team at Johns
Hopkins University that was working on a polio vaccine in the 1940s,
and it was her research that proved a killed-virus vaccine could
provide immunity against the disease.  Her work on the polio vaccine
ended abruptly when she married in 1949 and suddenly turned her
attention to her family responsibilities.  Some have speculated that
she would have beaten Salk in the race to the vaccine, had she not
dropped out.