Students in the UCSF Medical Anthropology & History of Health Sciences Program
Medical Anthropology PhD students
History of Health Sciences PhD students
2005-2006 Cohort
2007-2008 Cohort
Medical Anthropology PhD Students:
Nick Bartlett (MA International Affairs and Public Health, Columbia University)
Geographic Areas of Interest: China, Indonesia
Research Areas of Interest:
Addiction, citizenship, techniques of public health, global pharmaceuticals, biosociality, science studies.
Liza Buchbinder (MS, Health and Medical Sciences)
Geographical Area of Interest: Togo, West Africa
Research Areas of Interest: child labor and migration, child trafficking.
 Shana Harris (MA Anthropology, University of Colorado, Boulder)
Geographic Areas of Interest: Latin America, Argentina
Research Areas of Interest: drug use; harm reduction; science and technology studies; health movements and interventions.
Dissertation Reseach: Out of Harm’s Way: The Politics and Practice of Harm Reduction in Argentina
Email
Benjamin H. Hickler (MA Anthropology, U. of Colorado)
Geographic Areas of Interest: Lao PDR, Cambodia, Viet Nam, West Australia
Research Areas of Interest:Anthropology of health development; Animal-human relations; Anthropology of science, technology, and medicine in (post)colonial contexts; Political Anthropology--transnational biosecurity arrangements, citizenship, biopolitics, expertise, territory, and the persistence of sovereignty; RNA viruses.
Dissertaton Title: Politics of Animal Health - Biosecurity and Poverty Alleviation in the Lower Mekong
Email
Robin T. Higashi (MA Anthropology, UC Berkeley)
Geographic Areas of Interest: Urban U.S.; Ethnic Minorities
Research Areas of Interest: children's health; moral and political economies of health in philosophies of self-care; healthcare decision-making; health citizenship; poverty and immigration.
Email
Ippolytos Kalofonos, (MS/ MPH, UC Berkeley, MD/Ph.D. Candidate)
Geographic Areas of Interest : Mozambique , urban US
Research Areas of Interest: humanitarian intervention; global health; citizenship; clinical medical anthropology
Dissertation Title: "All I Eat is ARVs": Citizenship, Solidarity, and the Paradox of AIDS Treatment Interventions in Central Mozambique
Email
 Stephan Kloos (MA, Social Anthropology, University of Vienna, Austria).
Geographic Areas of Interest: India, Himalaya, Tibet
Research Area of Interest: Anthropology of Ethics; Postcolonial Science Studies; Medical Anthropology; Governance and Ethical Citizenship; Tibetan Medicine; Transnationalism and Globalization.
Dissertation Title: Tibetan medicine in Exile: the ethics, politics, and science of cultural survival
Stephan Kloos' publications
Email
Kelly Knight (MA, Education, Harvard University)
Geographic Areas of Interest: Urban US, Iran
Research Areas of Interest: public health HIV research; the construction of gender in drug-sex economies; HIV stigma, sexual behavior, and serostatus identity; and, the relationship between structural violence, intimate partner violence and housing instability. focusing specifically on the cultural construction of trauma, mental illness, gender, and health among poor women in U.S. urban settings.
Jennifer Liu (MA Anthropology, San Francisco State University) Geographic Areas of Interest: Taiwan, China, US
Research Areas of Interest: Technoscience, Bioethics, Transnationalism, Governance
Dissertation Title: Big Science and Traveling Bioethics: stem cell research in Taiwan
Email
 Suepattra May (MPH, University of Washington)
Geographic Areas of Interest: United States; previous work in Thailand and West Africa
Research Area of Interest: Breast and Gynecologic Cancers, Sexuality, Subjectivity, Public Health, STS, New Media Technologies
Dissertation Title: Whatever She Wants: An Ethnography of American Women, Modern Love, Sex and the Internet
Email
Rachel Niehuus (MD/PhD Candidate)
Geographic Areas of Interest: West Africa, Central Africa
Research Areas of Interest: Health education in conflict setting
Email
Betsy Pohlman (MA Anthropology, U of Arizona)
Geographic Areas of Interest: United States
Research Areas of Interest: Aging, Alzheimer's Disease, Down Syndrome, Advocacy and Activism, Social Policy in the Making, Bioethics, Governance and Governmentality, Citizenship
Dissertation Title: The Ethics and Politics of Caring and Curing: The Case of Alzheimer's Disease and Down Syndrome
Email
 Thurka Sangaramoorthy (MPH, Columbia University)
Geographic Areas of Interest: US, African diaspora
Research Areas of Interest: Risk, Race/Ethnicity, Politics of Numbers/Classifications, Stratified Biomedicalization, Ethnography in Clinical Settings, Public Health, and Science and Technology Studies Current Research: The rationalities of risk in HIV/AIDS research and surveillance data, and the ways in which they interface with representations of community, identity, culture, and difference among minority and transnational populations in the US.
Dissertation Title: Non-Identified Risk: Circulations of Numbers, People, and Power in HIV/AIDS Treatment and Prevention
Email
China Scherz (BA, UC Berkeley)
My work examines the negotiation of emergent ethical and moral dilemmas involved in the relationships between children, families, and institutions. Through research on unmarried motherhood in Ireland, the use of scientific form in the US Child Protective Services programs, and State and NGO efforts to implement the Convention of the Rights of the Child in Uganda I hope to describe several modes by which families relate to institutions and to develop a framework for analyzing how individuals and institutions make complex ethical decisions.
Geographic Areas of Interest: Sub-Saharan Africa, Urban US, Ireland.
Dissertation Research: Childhood and the Ethics of Care: Child Rights and Orphan Support NGOs in Uganda
Email
Jeff Schonberg (MA Anthropology, San Francisco State University)
Geographic Areas of Interest: urban United States, Latin America and Indonesia.
Research Areas of Interest: U.S. on homelessness, gangs and inner-city violence, the drug economy and HIV; social upheaval and street children in Latin America; 1965-1968 massacre. Bali, Indonesia, issues of photography, the representation of suffering, globalization and neoliberalism.
Scott Stonington (BS, Biological Sciences, Stanford University, MD/Ph.D. Candidate)
Geographic Areas of Interest: Thailand, Sub-Saharan Africa
Dissertation: Making karma out of modern death: Thailand and the anthropology of meta-ethics
Publications: The following articles can be found on the PLoS Medicine website:
Email
Allison Tillack (MA Anthropology, University of Arizona, MD/PhD Candidate)
Geographic Areas of Interests: United States
Research Area of Interest: anthropological perspective of the process by which new medical technologies are made a part of routine clinical practice; the process of collaboration between basic scientists and clinicians that affects the development, integration and stabilization of various technologies that impact the production of medical knowledge.
History of Health Sciences PhD Students
Note: The History of Health Sciences and Medical Anthropology programs admit their cohort of PhD students in alternating years. The 2005/6 History of Health Science group represents the first cohort for this new PhD program.
Akhil Mehra (MD, University of Pittsburgh, M.Phil History of Medicine) was born and raised in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania . He attended Johns Hopkins University and graduated with a B.A. degree in the History of Science Medicine and Technology. After his undergraduate degree, he had a stint in the U.K. at the University of Cambridge where he earned his M.Phil from the Cambridge Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine. Without pause (although probably needing one), he commenced upon medical training and got his M.D. at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. A distaste for freezing rain and grey winters brought him to California to do his residency training in psychiatry at UCSF. Having recently finished his residency he is excited to be picking up the thread of historical training yet again.
Niki Nibbe (MA Health and Society, Linköping University) She is interested in historical study of health delivery models, health activism during the 1970s, and the role of communities (on the local, state, and international level) in regard to the health of their populations. Her recent work has focused on acupuncture in the West, and on public health in Cultural Revolution China .
Elena Conis Email Elena Conis (MS, Environmental Health, UC Berkeley; MJ, Print Journalism, UC Berkeley) completed her BA in Biology at Columbia University in New York. She has been a columnist and contributing writer for the Los Angeles Times since 2003 and has worked as a consultant to public health organizations and as a lecturer in environmental health at UC Berkeley.
Rebecca Kaplan Email Rebecca Kaplan received her B.S. in biological sciences, and history and policy from Carnegie Mellon University (2004). She went on to completed a M.S. in epidemiology at University of Texas School of Public Health (2006).
Aimee Klask Email Aimee Klask received her B.A. in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of California, Berkeley (1995) and her M.A. in History from San Francisco State University (2001). Her current interests include the history of American medicine and public health, with an emphasis on gender and chronic illness.
Sheila Nathan Email Sheila Nathan (MPH, Columbia University) attended the University of California, Irvine and graduated with a B.S degree in Biological Sciences with a focus in Neuroscience. After her undergraduate degree, she completed a one year research fellowship investigating learning and memory processes. Subsequently, she traveled east to study public health at Columbia University, focusing on Health Policy and continued in the field conducting research at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. Sheila was then brought to UCSF to further investigate the historical progression of the health care delivery system, specifically to understand the role of public health and the government.
Wen Shen Email I was born and raised in San Francisco, but spent part of my childhood in Northern New Jersey. I received my undergraduate degree in History and Science at Harvard; in my senior thesis I studied the use of diethylstilbestrol (DES) in the prevention of miscarriages in the 1940s and 1950s. I abandoned history to attend medical school at UCSF, but halfway through my clinical rotations I caught the bug again. Between my 3rd and 4th years of medical school I spent a year studying medical history here at UCSF. My thesis paper was on the 1942 Cocoanut Grove Fire in Boston and its impact on burn treatment. After medical school I stayed at UCSF for my residency in general surgery. After 8 years of training, I am finally in practice; I am on the faculty at UCSF and divide my time between the Mt. Zion campus and the VA Medical Center. My specialty is endocrine surgery of the thyroid, parathyroid, and adrenal glands. In addition to my clinical practice, I have started in the masters program in the history of medicine, with a hope of incorporating medical history into my academic career as a surgeon.
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