Julie Park is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her research interests in medical anthropology have included emphases on inequality, gender and applied community health, with a geographic focus on Aotearoa New Zealand, and parts of Polynesia. Genetic conditions, infectious diseases, and well-being have featured in her recent work, published with members of her research teams: Haemophilia in Aotearoa New Zealand: More than a Bleeding Nuisance (Routledge 2019, 2020), “Towards Indigenous Policy and Practice: A Tuvaluan Framework for Wellbeing, Ola Lei” (Journal of the Polynesian Society, 2021) and “The Predicament of d/Deaf: Towards an Anthropology of Non-Disability” (Human Organization, 2015). She continues her collaboration with Ruth Fitzgerald and Michael Legge on publications on everyday ethics in the context of reproductive technologies and genetic conditions and with Judith Littleton on publications from their research on tuberculosis in New Zealand, the Cook Islands, and Tuvalu.
Marsha Quinlan is Medical Anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology at Washington State University. She concentrates on ethnomedicine and ethnobiology, including ethnozoology, ethnobotany, and health behavior in families. Prominent themes in her research are the cultural shaping of health and medicine (risks and treatment); cultural influence on individuals’ contact with plants and animals; and, the effects of human–plant or human–animal interactions on health and medicine. She has worked in North and South America, East Africa, and has especially worked in the Caribbean country of Dominica since 1993. She also conducts cross-cultural ethnology on topics related to her fieldwork-based research.
Gilbert Quintero is Professor in the School of Public and Community Health Sciences at the University of Montana. His research foci include examination of sociocultural aspects of drug use in several different populations in the United States, including American Indians, Hispanics, and young adult college students. His current interests include the integration of information and communication technologies into social interactions and drug-use practices among young adults in collegiate environments and the nonmedical use of pharmaceuticals.
Nancy Romero-Daza is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. As a medical anthropologist she has extensive experience conducting community-based research, designing and evaluating health-related interventions, and overseeing the delivery of social services to diverse populations. She has conducted research and program evaluation on HIV/AIDS, harm reduction, drug use, chronic disease management, food security, and health of minority populations. Other areas of interest include sexual and reproductive health and ethics of research. She has worked in the United States, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Costa Rica, and Lesotho.
Barbara Rylko-Bauer is Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Michigan State University. Her writing has focused on health-care inequalities, structural violence, applied anthropology, political violence, and medicine in the Holocaust. She has served as Book Review Editor for Medical Anthropology Quarterly. Her recent publications include chapters in The Sage Handbook of Social Studies in Health and Medicine (2nd edition) and The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty, The Syndemics and Structural Violence of the COVID Pandemic: Anthropological Insights on a Crisis (with Merrill Singer, in Open Anthropological Research, 2020), Global Health in Times of Violence (co-edited with Linda Whiteford and Paul Farmer, 2009), and A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps (2014).
Eleanor Shoreman-Ouimet is Assistant Professor of Human and Environment Interactions at the University of Connecticut whose research and teaching focuses on human–environment interactions, environmental justice, cross-cultural conservation practices, community response to natural hazards and the effects of climate change, and the links between culture, history, environmental ethics, and resource management. Shoreman-Ouimet’s recent publications have addressed anthropological approaches to the study of environmental repair, the influence of anthropocentrism in the social sciences, and facilitating cooperative efforts between anthropologists and conservation groups. In addition to teaching and researching issues pertaining to environment, Shoreman-Ouimet is also involved in research and teaching initiatives focused on increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the University setting, specifically studying the prevalence of racial microaggressions on university campuses.
Sandy Smith-Nonini, PhD, is a research assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work has focused on the intersection of medical anthropology and political economy – including projects on health systems, resurgent infectious disease epidemics, working conditions of US migrant labor, and the relationship of oil dependence and debt to energy poverty. She authored Healing the Body Politic: El Salvador’s Popular Struggle for Health Rights – From Civil War to Neoliberal Peace, (Rutgers University Press, 2010), aided by a Richard Carley Hunt Award from the Wenner Gren Foundation. Sandy recently produced Dis.em.POWER.ed: Puerto Rico’s Perfect Storm, a film on the “fossil colonial” origins of the longest US blackout: www.disempoweredfilm.com.
Merrill Singer is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Singer’s work has focused on infectious disease (including COVID-19), syndemics, and environmental health. He is the author of 34 books, and over 220 peer-reviewed articles. Social justice, the social determinants of health, climate change, and critical medical anthropology have been enduring themes of his research and applied work. His most recent books are titled Climate Change and Social Inequality: The Health and Social Costs of Global Warming (Routledge, 2018) and EcoCrises Interaction: Human Health and the Changing Environment (Wiley, 2021).
Elisa (E. J.) Sobo is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at San Diego State University. Recent projects concern the intersection between health and education, vaccination choice, cannabis use for children with intractable epilepsy, and conspiratorial thinking. Sobo is currently part of the CommuniVax coalition, a nationwide participatory action research initiative focused on community-based capacity building for an equitable and effective COVID-19 vaccination rollout. Past president of the Society for Medical Anthropology, and current Section Assembly Convener for the American Anthropological Association, Sobo has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and has authored, coauthored, and coedited 13 books—including second editions of both Dynamics of Human Biocultural Diversity: A Unified Approach and The Cultural Context of Health, Illness, and Medicine. Her work has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other news outlets.
Patricia K. Townsend holds a courtesy appointment as Research Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, the University at Buffalo. She is author of multiple editions of two widely used college textbooks, Medical Anthropology in Ecological Perspective (with Ann McElroy) and Environmental Anthropology: From Pigs to Policy. She has done fieldwork in lowland Papua, New Guinea, and Peru and at toxic waste sites in the United States. She has done applied work with refugees and religious groups in the United States and maternal and child health services in Papua, New Guinea. In retirement, she has turned to environmental activism at a nuclear waste site, serving on the West Valley Citizen Task Force.
Robert T. Trotter, II, began publishing applied oriented cross-cultural research in the fields of culturally competent health-care delivery and culturally sensitive approaches to substance use and misuse and in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas in 1976, based on research on culturally influenced communication on patient interactions and substance abuse prevention processes (including information from traditional healers on the US Mexico border), as well as cross-cultural comparisons of alcohol use among Hispanic and Anglo college students. In the 1980s his research focus included institutionally oriented research on migrant health and cross-cultural health-care systems, and in the 1990s evolved into research on the confluence