His award-winning books include Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette (University of Chicago Press, 2021); Pain: A Political History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); How Cancer Crossed the Color Line (Oxford University Press, 2011); The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), with Stephen Pemberton; Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth Century America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

His co-edited volumes include, Medicare and Medicaid at 50: America's Entitlement Programs in the Age of Affordable Care (with Alan Cohen and Julian Zelizer, Oxford University Press, 2015); Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (with Alondra Nelson and Catherine Lee, Rutgers University Press, 2012); Katrina’s Imprint: Race and Vulnerability in America (with Karen O’Neill, Jeffrey Dowd, and Roland Anglin, Rutgers University Press, 2010); Three Shots at Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine's Simple Solutions (with Stephen Epstein and Robert Aronowitz, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); and A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, the Bungled Transplant, and Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship (with Julie Livingston and Peter Guarnaccia, University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

He has published articles in Lancet, the New York Times, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Daily Beast, American Prospect, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, the Bulletin for the History of Medicine, the Journal for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, and the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law.

Before joining the Princeton faculty, Wailoo was Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University and founding director of its Center for Race and Ethnicity. Prior to Rutgers, he taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the School of Medicine and in History.  His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Investigator Awards in Health Policy Research, and the James S. McDonnell Foundation's Centennial Fellowship in the History of Science.

Wailoo is a graduate of Yale University where he earned a Bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering, after which he worked as a science writer for several years. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in the History and Sociology of Science.