Welcome
I am a biocultural anthropologist at Arizona State University, where I founded the Center for Global Health. Trained in human biology, demography, and medical anthropology, I do collaborative, transdisciplinary social science research to understand and solve complex health and environmental challenges. At ASU, I teach undergraduate anthropology and global health and train advanced students interested in careers in or beyond the academy. I am also in a new role as Senior Editor (Medical Anthropology) for the journal Social Science and Medicine.
Newest Project: REACH-WISER
One of my main efforts in 2022-2023 is supporting a massive, innovative cross-country study of how to improve household resiliency to water insecurity. REACH is a nine-year global research program (2015 - 24) to improve water security for 10 million poor people in Asia and Africa led by the University of Oxford, and based at eight observatories across three countries (Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Kenya).
With a large international team that includes anthropologists, geographers, economists, gender and development scholars, water/health/environmental scientists, and many others, REACH-WISER advances new models for the direct translation of people's experiences of water insecurity to transnational policy application for improving water and gender development interventions.
Our New Books
Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting: Stigma and the Undoing of Global Health: Winner of the Carol R Ember Book Prize (2021) and the Human Biology Association Book Award (2020).
Extreme Weight Loss: Life Before and After Bariatric Surgery (2021).
Fat in Four Cultures: A Global Ethnography of Weight (2021).
Our Psychology Today Blog
You can visit our Psychology Today blog to enjoy some posts related to our and others' research and thoughts on the connections between stigma and health, imagining ways to make life better for all.
Online Stigma Training
We have recently developed a stigma awareness/reduction training for CHES credit that is offered free through the Western Public Health Training Center.
Recent Podcasts
Period Podcast. Illness, stigma, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Psych Central. How stigma is everywhere.
Water and Society - book series
We are editing a new book series in partnership with Johns Hopkins University Press. We are looking for insightful social science about how water - or lack of it - shapes and reflects our lives and societies.
Household Water Insecurity Experiences Research Network (HWISE-RCN)
I am proud to be on the steering committee of the HWISE research collaborative network, funded by the National Science Foundation. The effort brings together scholars and practitioners from all around the world to better document the lived experience of water insecurity.
The homepage header is a painting by Odra Noel, courtesy of Wellcome Collections. It shows the tissue of the major diseases in different world regions