Ron Barrett is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Macalester College. Conducting field research in India and North America, he has examined the ways that people come to terms with their mortality, ritual healing practices, and the social dynamics of infectious diseases. His dissertation research on mortality-informed stigma and the religious healing of leprosy is the topic of a book, Aghor Medicine: Pollution, Death and Healing in Northern India (University of California Press), which received the 2008 Welcome Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute. Together with George Armelagos, he coauthored An Unnatural History of Emerging Infections, the second edition of which will be published in 2022 as Emerging Infections: The Human Determinants of Pandemic Diseases from Prehistory to the Present (Oxford University Press). Prior to his academic career, Barrett was a registered nurse with clinical experience in hospice, brain injury rehabilitation, and neurointensive care.
Charles L. Briggs is Professor of Anthropology, Co-Director of Medical Anthropology Program, Co-Director of Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, University of California, Berkeley, and the Alan Dundes Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology of the University of California, Berkeley. His books include The Wood Carvers of Córdova, New Mexico: Social Dimensions of an Artistic “Revival”; Learning How to Ask: A Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science Research; Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (with Richard Bauman); Competence in Performance: The Creativity of Tradition in Mexicano Verbal Art; Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare (with Clara Mantini-Briggs); Making Health Public: How News Coverage Is Remaking Media, Medicine, and Contemporary Life (with Daniel Hallin); Tell Me Why My Children Died: Rabies, Indigenous Knowledge and Communicative Justice (with Clara Mantini-Briggs); and Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge. He has received such honors as the James Mooney Award, the Chicago Folklore Prize, Edward Sapir Book Prize, the J. I. Staley Prize, the Américo Paredes Prize, the New Millennium Book Award, the Cultural Horizons Prize, the Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, the School for Advanced Research, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is currently President of the Society for Medical Anthropology.
Heide Castañeda is Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. Her research areas include political and legal anthropology, medical anthropology, borders, migration, migrant health, citizenship, and policing, focusing on the US/Mexico border, United States, Mexico, Germany, and Morocco. She is the author of Borders of Belonging: Struggle and Solidarity in Mixed-Status Immigrant Families (Stanford University Press, 2019) and co-editor of Unequal Coverage: The Experience of Health Care Reform in the United States (NYU Press, 2018). Her latest book is Migration and Health: Critical Perspectives (Routledge). Dr. Castañeda has also published dozens of research articles on migration and health-care access for immigrant populations. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the Fulbright Program, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
Kitty Corbett is Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby/Vancouver, Canada. She has expertise in multimethod research, change theories, health communication, knowledge translation, cultural diversity, social marketing, and public health advocacy. She has contributed to public health projects and research addressing local to global health challenges of antibiotic resistance, appropriate pharmaceutical use, HIV and STI prevention, tobacco use, Chagas disease, cancer prevention, and promotion of local and traditional foods. With students, community partners, and colleagues, she has collaborated on and directed projects in the United States, Canada, Taiwan, Vietnam, Mongolia, Russia, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Argentina, and other countries. She has twice been a Fulbright Scholar, in Taiwan and Mexico.
William W. Dressler (PhD Connecticut, 1978) is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Alabama. His research interests focus on cognitive culture theory, research methods, and especially the relationship between culture and the individual. Dressler and colleagues have examined these factors in settings as diverse as urban Great Britain, the Southeast United States, the West Indies, Mexico, and Brazil. His recent work emphasizes concepts and methods for examining the health effects of individual efforts to achieve culturally defined goals and aspirations. His research has been funded by both the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
Mounia El Kotni is a medical anthropologist (PhD SUNY Albany, 2016) and postdoctoral researcher at the Cems-EHESS in Paris, France, and Fondation de France Research Fellow (2019–2021). She has been conducting research in Chiapas, Mexico, since 2013 on the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth and on traditional midwives’ rights. More recently, her research has focused on the intersection between reproductive and environmental justice.
Ruth Fitzgerald is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She researches in the field of medical anthropology with a focus on ideologies of health, the cultural significance of new medical technologies, and moral reasoning and genetic testing with a geographic focus on Aotearoa, New Zealand. She was awarded the Te Rangi Hiroa Medal by the Royal Society of New Zealand for her work in medical anthropology and is currently the general editor of Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies. She continues to collaborate with Julie Park and Michael Legge on publications in the everyday ethics of reproductive decision-making and genetic testing and teaches across the graduate and postgraduate programs of Social Anthropology and the First Year Health Sciences program at Otago.
Alan Goodman, professor of biological anthropology at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, teaches and writes on the health and nutritional consequences of political–economic processes including poverty, inequality, and racism. He received his BS and PhD from the University of Massachusetts/Amherst, and was a postdoctoral fellow in international nutrition at the National Institute of Nutrition, Mexico, and a research fellow in stress physiology at Karolinska Institute, Stockholm. He previously served as the Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dean of Faculty and Dean of Natural Sciences at Hampshire and is a past President of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). He codirects the AAA’s public education project on race (understandingrace.org). Goodman has written over one hundred articles and is the editor or author of eight books including Building a New Biocultural Synthesis, Nutritional Anthropology, and Race: Are We So Different? His forthcoming book is Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (with Joseph Graves, 2021, Columbia).
Ashley L. Graham is a PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on the anthropological study of risk, environmental disasters, infectious disease epidemics, vaccines, and global health governance. Graham’s most recent publications address the use of novel vaccines and the risk of coronaviruses in pregnancy, respectively. She also works for The Task Force for Global Health, a global health organization based in Atlanta, GA, where her work centers on global health ethics and cultivating resilience.
Clarence C. Gravlee is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida, with affiliate appointments in African American Studies, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Center for the Study of Race and Racism. His research aims to explain and address how systemic racism harms health and corrupts medical research and practice. He is former editor of Medical Anthropology Quarterly, co-founder (with M.