New England Journal of Medicine “Case Studies in Social Medicine” Bringing Structural Frameworks to Global Public Health and Health Care
The New England Journal of Medicine “Case Studies in Social Medicine” project commissioned and edited a series of articles to communicate the social structures affecting the health and well-being of patients in ways that will influence the programs, projects, and care provided by health professionals. Articles are authored by clinicians and social medicine scholars and describe a clinical case as well as analyze the case to bring out social structural insights vital to the understanding and practice of health care. As a field of research, social medicine seeks to understand the ways in which social factors influence health, disease, and medical practice. The goal of the series is to show that social forces are just as amenable to analysis, investigation, and intervention as the cellular and molecular mechanisms of disease and to demonstrate that social forces are at least as important to analyze, investigate, and address. This project is sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine, Johns Hopkins University's Center for the Medical Humanities and Social Medicine and the Open Society Foundations.
Cases
Series Introduction: Case Studies in Social Medicine — Attending to Structural Forces in Clinical Practice
Authors: Scott D. Stonington, M.D., Ph.D., Seth M. Holmes, Ph.D., M.D., Helena Hansen, M.D., Ph.D., Jeremy A. Greene, M.D., Ph.D., Keith A. Wailoo, Ph.D., Debra Malina, Ph.D., Stephen Morrissey, Ph.D., Paul E. Farmer, M.D., Ph.D., and Michael G. Marmot, M.B., B.S., Ph.D.
Medicalization and Demedicalization — A Gravely Disabled Homeless Man with Psychiatric Illness
Authors: Joel T. Braslow, M.D., Ph.D. and Luke Messac, M.D., Ph.D.
The Structural Violence of Hyperincarceration — A 44-Year-Old Man with Back Pain
Authors: George Karandinos, B.A. and Philippe Bourgois, Ph.D.
Structural Differential — A 32-Year-Old Man with Persistent Wrist Pain
Authors: Cheryl K. Seymour, M.D., Carrie Griffin, D.O., Seth M. Holmes, Ph.D., M.D., and Carlos Martinez, M.P.H.
Structural Iatrogenesis — A 43-Year-Old Man with “Opioid Misuse”
Authors: Scott Stonington, M.D., Ph.D. and Diana Coffa M.D.
Social Distance and Mobility — A 39-Year-Old Pregnant Migrant Farmworker
Authors: Laszlo Madaras, M.D., M.P.H., Scott Stonington, M.D., Ph.D., Claire H. Seda, B.A., Deliana Garcia, M.A., and Ed Zuroweste, M.D.
Structural Racism — A 60-Year-Old Black Woman with Breast Cancer
Authors: Kristen Pallok, B.S., Fernando De Maio, Ph.D., and David A. Ansell, M.D., M.P.H.
The Power and Limits of Classification — A 32-Year-Old Man with Abdominal Pain
Authors: Daphna Stroumsa, M.D., M.P.H., Elizabeth F.S. Roberts, Ph.D., Hadrian Kinnear, B.A., and Lisa H. Harris, M.D., Ph.D.
Authors: Héctor Carrasco, M.D., M.P.H., Luke Messac, M.D., Ph.D., and Seth M. Holmes, M.D., Ph.D.
The Right and Left Hands of the State — Two Patients at Risk of Deportation
Authors: Anita Berlin, M.B., B.S., Ed.D., Victoria Koski-Karell, B.A., Kathleen R. Page, M.D., and Sarah Polk, M.D., M.H.S.
Reproductive (In)justice — Two Patients with Avoidable Poor Reproductive Outcomes
Authors: Kelly R. Knight, Ph.D., Laura G. Duncan, B.A., Marek Szilvasi, Ph.D., Ashish Premkumar, M.D., Margareta Matache, Ph.D., and Andrea Jackson, M.D.
Authors: Robert Aronowitz, M.D., and Jeremy A. Greene, M.D., Ph.D.
Democratizing Evidence Production — A 51-Year-Old Man with Sudden Onset of Dense Hemiparesis
Authors: Shaheen Chowdhury, D.N.B., Timothy Laux, M.D., M.P.H., Michelle Morse, M.D., M.P.H., Angela Jenks, Ph.D., Scott Stonington, M.D., Ph.D., and Yogesh Jain, M.D.
Authors: Ippolytos Kalofonos, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., M.H.S.
Embracing Multiple Normals — A 12-Year-Old Boy in India with a Cochlear Implant
Authors: Michele Friedner, Ph.D., Rema Nagarajan, M.A., Anjali Murthy, B.A., and Raphael Frankfurter, B.A.
Dialogic Praxis — A 16-Year-Old Boy with Anxiety in Southern Brazil
Authors: Dominique P. Béhague, Ph.D., Raphael G. Frankfurter, A.B., Helena Hansen, M.D., Ph.D., and Cesar G. Victora, M.D., Ph.D.
Closing Editorial: Misdiagnosis, Mistreatment, and Harm — When Medical Care Ignores Social Forces
Authors: Seth M. Holmes, Ph.D., M.D., Helena Hansen, M.D., Ph.D., Angela Jenks, Ph.D., Scott D. Stonington, M.D., Ph.D., Michelle Morse, M.D., M.P.H., Jeremy A. Greene, M.D., Ph.D., Keith A. Wailoo, Ph.D., Michael G. Marmot, M.B., B.S., Ph.D., and Paul E. Farmer, M.D., Ph.D.
Editors (see bios below):
Scott Stonington, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor
Seth Holmes, Co-Chair of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine and Associate Professor of Society and Environment and Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco
Helena Hansen, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry at New York University
Michelle Morse, Founding Co-Director of EqualHealth and Assistant Program Director of the Internal Medicine Residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital
Angela Jenks, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Irvine
Jeremy Greene, Professor of Medicine and the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University
Keith Wailoo, Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University
Paul Farmer, Kolokotrones University Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard University
Sir Michael Marmot, Professor of Epidemiology at University College London
Editorial Coordinators (see bios below):
Laura G. Duncan, MD/PhD student, University of California, San Francisco/Berkeley
Vicky Koski-Karell, MD/PhD student, University of Michigan
Fabián Fernández, Case Series Editorial Coordinator
Raphael Frankfurter, MD/PhD student, University of California, San Francisco/Berkeley
Editors
Scott Stonington, Case Series Co-Editor
Scott Stonington, MD, PhD, holds a joint-appointment as Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and an internal medicine physician at the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System. After earning his PhD in Medical Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco, and his MD from the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Stonington completed residency training in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Dr. Stonington’s research broadly addresses the globalization of biomedical ethics and expertise. His first project in this area focused on decision-making at the end of life in Thailand, where individuals face a complex combination of ethical frameworks generated by high-tech medical care, human-rights politics, and the metaphysical demands of dying. Dr. Stonington spent two years accompanying Thai elders at their deathbeds, documenting their children’s attempts to pay back their “debt of life” via intensive medical care, as well as the ensuing “spirit ambulance,” a rush to get patients on life-support home at the last possible moment to orchestrate the final breath in a spiritually advantageous place. Dr. Stonington’s second project in this area focuses on global debates over the use of opiates for pain management.
Dr. Stonington has published extensively in social medicine for clinical audiences, including editing a special issue of PLoS Medicine in 2006 entitled “Social Medicine in the 21st Century” (with Seth Holmes), as well as individual pieces in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet.
Dr. Stonington’s secondary research agenda addresses medical epistemology in the United States, specifically how health practitioners decide what constitutes true and/or useful knowledge and how this affects patients. This work grows out of his ongoing practice as an Internal Medicine physician, both in the hospital and in primary care.
Seth M. Holmes, Case Series Co-Editor 
Seth M. Holmes, MD, PhD, is Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology, Society and Environment; Co-Chair of the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine; and Co-Director of the MD/PhD Track in Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. A cultural and medical anthropologist and internal medicine physician, Dr. Holmes focuses broadly on social hierarchies and health inequities. His recent book, Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies (2013), received multiple prizes in anthropology, sociology and geography. Based on five years of research in the field, traveling with and working with migrants, his book uncovers how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and structural racism undermine health and health care.
Dr. Holmes received his PhD in Medical Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco, and his MD from the University of California, San Francisco. He completed his internship and residency in internal medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, followed by the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars program at Columbia University.
Dr. Holmes is now conducting ethnographic research into the subtle processes in clinical training that shape the lenses through which clinical trainees perceive social difference. In addition, Dr. Holmes is engaging in collaborative research and videography focusing on the ways in which immigrant families care for one other across international borders. Along with other academics, clinicians, activists and artists in the Structural Competency Working Group, Dr. Holmes is engaged in imagining and experimenting with alternatives to the current systems of health care and racialized policing in the United States.
Helena Hansen, Case Series Co-Editor
Helena Hansen, MD, PhD, is a joint-appointed Assistant Professor of anthropology and psychiatry at New York University, and a research psychiatrist at the New York State Office of Mental Health's Nathan Kline Institute. She earned an MD and PhD in cultural anthropology as part of Yale University’s NIH funded Medical Scientist Training Program. During graduate school, she completed fieldwork in Havana on Cuban AIDS policy, in urban Connecticut on harm reduction and needle exchange, and in Puerto Rico on faith healing in evangelical Christian addiction ministries founded and run by self-identified ex-addicts. Her work has been published in both clinical and social science journals ranging from the Journal of the American Medical Association and Health Affairs to Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry and Medical Anthropology.
After graduate school, Dr. Hansen completed a clinical residency in psychiatry at NYU Medical Center/Bellevue Hospital, during which she also undertook an ethnographic study of the introduction of new addiction pharmaceuticals. She examined the social and political implications of clinicians’ efforts to establish addiction as a biomedical, rather than moral or social condition, as well as the ways that neurochemical treatments may be reinscribing hierarchies of ethnicity and race.
As a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation fellow from 2014-2018, Dr. Hansen produced a feature length visual documentary, Managing the Fix (2017), based on this work. She is also leading a national movement for training of clinical practitioners to address social determinants of health, which she and co-leader RWJ Clinical Scholar Jonathan Metzl call "Structural Competency." Dr. Hansen is the recipient of the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Investigator Award, Kaiser Permanente Burche Minority Leadership Award, a NIDA K01 Award, a Mellon Sawyer Seminar grant, and the American Association of Directors of Psychiatry Residency Training Model Curriculum Award.
Michelle Morse, Case Series Co-Editor
Dr. Morse is Founding Co-Director of EqualHealth and Assistant Program Director for the Internal Medicine Residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Morse co-founded EqualHealth (www.equalhealth.org), an organization that aims to inspire and support the development of Haiti's next generation of healthcare leaders through transforming medical and nursing education and creating opportunities for Haitian health professionals to thrive. She works to strengthen medical education globally, expand the teaching of social medicine in the US and abroad, and to support health systems strengthening through EqualHealth. In 2015 Dr. Morse worked with several partners to found the Social Medicine Consortium (SMC), a global coalition of over 700 people representing over 50 universities and organizations in twelve countries, which seeks to use activism and disruptive pedagogy rooted in the practice and teaching of social medicine to address the miseducation of health professionals on the root causes of illness. In 2018, Dr. Morse was named as a Soros Equality Fellow and will be working on the SMC’s global Campaign Against Racism during the fellowship.
Dr. Morse is an internal medicine hospitalist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) through the Division of Global Health Equity, an instructor on the faculty at Harvard Medical School, and an affiliate of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine. She served as Deputy ChiefMedical Officer for Partners in Health (PIH) from 2013 to 2016. She also served as an advisor to the Medical Director of Mirebalais Hospital, a newly built public academic medical center established through a partnership between the government of Haiti and PIH. Previously, she served as Director of Medical Education at Mirebalais Hospital, where she started the hospital’s first three residency programs. She began serving on the Board of Directors of Partners In Health in the spring of 2018.
As a Howard Hiatt Global Health Equity resident in Internal Medicine at BWH from 2008-2012, Dr. Morse worked in Haiti, Rwanda, and Botswana. She focused her international work in Haiti where she helped to coordinate Partners In Health’s (PIH) earthquake relief efforts, was a first-responder for the cholera epidemic, and worked on women's health and quality improvement projects.
Angela Jenks, Case Series Co-Editor
Angela Jenks, PhD is an Assistant Teaching Professor (LPSOE) and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. She earned her Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco. Her research explores the way anthropological notions of culture, race, and difference are invoked in the development of “cultural competence” efforts in four intersecting areas of the health system: health disparities research, medical education, managed care, and ethnically-specialized clinics. This research reflects her concern with health equity and the politics of difference in the United States as well as her interest in the shifting relationship between medical anthropology and biomedicine.
Dr. Jenks's current work focuses on anthropology pedagogy and strategies for communicating social science insights to broad publics. She has taught in the Program in Medical Education for the Latino Community (PRIME-LC) at the UCI School of Medicine, is the recipient of multiple teaching awards, and is a founding editor and current Editor-in-Chief of the Teaching and Learning Anthropology Journal.
Jeremy Greene, Case Series Co-Editor
Jeremy Greene, MD, PhD, is Professor of Medicine and the History of Medicine and the Elizabeth Treide and A. McGehee Harvey Chair in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. His interests span the history of disease, with research that explores the ways in which medical technologies come to influence our understandings of what it means to be sick or healthy, normal or abnormal.
Dr. Greene’s most recent book, Generic: The Unbranding of Modern Medicine (2014), narrates the history of generic drugs as a means of exploring problems of similarity and difference in modern medicine. With support from a Faculty Scholars Fellowship from the Greenwall Foundation, his new project, Medicine At a Distance, examines how changing expectations of instantaneous communications through electric, electronic, and digital media transformed the nature of medical knowledge. This research is focused on recapturing how mundane technologies of communication enabled and altered the production, circulation, and consumption of medical knowledge, from telegraph to text pager, telephone to telemedicine, fax machine to Facebook.
Dr. Greene’s broader research interests focus on the history of disease, medical technology, the history of global health, and the relationship between medicine and the marketplace. He received his MD and PhD in the history of science from Harvard in 2005, completed a residency in Internal Medicine at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital in 2008, and is board certified in Internal Medicine and a member of the American College of Physicians. In addition to his appointment at the JHU Institute for the History of Medicine, he also practices internal medicine at the East Baltimore Medical Center, a community health center affiliated with Johns Hopkins.
Keith Wailoo, Case Series Co-Editor
Keith Andrew Wailoo is Henry Putnam University Professor of History and Public Affairs at Princeton University where he teaches in the Department of History and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is the former Vice Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School. He is an award-winning author on drugs and drug policy; race, science, and health; history of medicine; and health policy and medical affairs in the U.S. Wailoo is currently working on two book-length projects, both intersecting with history and public policy: a study of the menthol cigarette, and a history of addiction.
His previous books include: 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), 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). He has lectured widely, and published articles in the British medical journal 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.
Paul Farmer, Case Series Co-Editor
Medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer has dedicated his life to improving health care for the world's poorest people. Dr. Farmer holds an M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he is the Kolokotrones University Professor and the Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is Co-Founder and Chief Strategist of Partners In Health (PIH), an international non-profit organization that since 1987 has provided direct health care services and undertaken research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. He is Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Additionally, Dr. Farmer serves as the United Nations Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Community Based Medicine and Lessons from Haiti.
Dr. Farmer is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Bronislaw Malinowski Award and the Margaret Mead Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology, the Outstanding International Physician (Nathan Davis) Award from the American Medical Association, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and, with his PIH colleagues, the Hilton Humanitarian Prize. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Michael Marmot, Case Series Co-Editor
Sir Michael Marmot has led a research group on health inequalities for the past 30 years. He is Principal Investigator of the Whitehall Studies of British civil servants, investigating explanations for the striking inverse social gradient in morbidity and mortality. He leads the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) and is engaged in several international research efforts on the social determinants of health. He chairs the Department of Health Scientific Reference Group on tackling health inequalities. He was a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution for six years and is an honorary fellow of the British Academy.
In 2000 he was knighted by Her Majesty The Queen for services to Epidemiology and understanding health inequalities. Internationally acclaimed, Professor Marmot is a Vice President of the Academia Europaea, a Foreign Associate Member of the Institute of Medicine (IOM), and the Chair of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health set up by the World Health Organization in 2005. He won the Balzan Prize for Epidemiology in 2004, gave the Harveian Oration in 2006 and won the William B. Graham Prize for Health Services Research in 2008.
Editorial Coordinators
Laura G. Duncan, Case Series Editorial Coordinator
Laura G. Duncan is an MD/PhD candidate in the University of California, San Francisco/University of California, Berkeley joint program in medicine and medical anthropology. Her research focuses on the healthcare experiences of LGBT, queer, and gender-expansive communities, as well as techniques and theories of medical education. She is also part of the Bay Area Structural Competency Working Group, which designs and facilitates trainings for heathcare professionals on addressing systemic causes of health inequality. She has previously served as a full-spectrum doula and researched stigma within opioid replacement treatments.
Vicky Koski-Karell, Case Series Editorial Coordinator
Vicky Koski-Karell is an MD/PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Michigan, where she is also completing a graduate certificate in the UM Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Program. Her research and interests build on more than a decade of engagement in Haiti, including ethnographic fieldwork and advocacy related to the cholera epidemic that started there in October 2010. Her present work seeks to critically understand how water mediates governance and health inequalities in Haiti, and particularly how it is implicated in ‘development’ and in attempts to eliminate cholera transmission. Vicky is also embarking on a documentary film project about water access in a rural Haitian community—not far from where the cholera outbreak began—that will additionally serve as a tool for amplifying Haitian voices and raising funds to support a community-directed water project where it has been locally identified as most needed.
Fabián Fernández, Case Series Editorial Coordinator
Fabián Fernández is an MD/PhD candidate in the UCSF/UCB program medical anthropology. He studies studying violence, institutional responses to threats of violence, and coercive forms of care in the Medical Industrial Complex. He is also an organizer with the Do No Harm Coalition and Clínica Martín Baró working on the abolition of policing and prisons, trauma-informed care, and transformative justice.
Raphael Frankfurter, Case Series Editorial Coordinator
Raphael Frankfurter is an MD/PhD student in the University of California, San Francisco/University of California, Berkeley Joint Program in medicine and medical anthropology. His research focuses on rural Sierra Leone, and the ways in which biosecuritization efforts in the wake of the Ebola outbreak are intersecting with landscapes of healing, health and care. He is also interested in the political-economy of aid and under-development, epidemiological discourse, knowledge-production and logics, and the history of colonial medicine in West Africa. He previously worked as the Executive Director of Wellbody Alliance, a community health organization in Sierra Leone, and oversaw its response to the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak, integration with Partners in Health, and design and implementation of community-based Ebola care programs.
Participants
David Ansell
David Ansell, MD, MPH is the Michael E. Kelley Professor of Internal Medicine and Senior Vice President for Community Health Equity at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. He is a general internist and social epidemiologist. He has been particularly involved in health equity research and activism, bringing attention to the health consequences of patient dumping, addressing structural racism as a cause for higher rates of breast cancer mortality for African-American women in Chicago and highlighting issues of access to transplant care for the undocumented and uninsured. In 2007 he co-founded the Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Taskforce a not-for-profit that focuses on eliminating the racial disparities in breast cancer mortality. He is also a founder and member of the Center for Community Health Equity a research and educational center that promotes the pedagogy and practice of social medicine and public health. He is the author of numerous papers and book chapters on health disparities. In 2011 he published an acclaimed memoir based on his experiences as a doctor in Chicago, County: Life, Death and Politics at Chicago’s Public Hospital. His most recent book The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills, was released by the University of Chicago Press in 2017. Dr. Ansell is a graduate of SUNY Upstate Medical University and received his Masters of Public Health from the University of Illinois School of Public Health. He is a proponent of single payer health care and a member of the Social Medicine Consortium.
Robert Aronowitz
Robert Aronowitz is Professor and Chair, History and Sociology of Science, at the University of Pennsylvania. He studied linguistics at Berkeley before receiving his MD from Yale. At Penn, Aronowitz was the founding director of the Health and Societies Program and co-director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars Program. He is the author of Making Sense of Illness: Science, Society, and Disease (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Unnatural History: Breast Cancer and American Society (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Risky Medicine: Our Quest to Cure Fear & Uncertainty (Chicago University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Three Shots at Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine's Simple Solutions (Hopkins, 2010), and has published widely on the history of medicine and disease.
Kirsten Austad
Kirsten Austad MD, MPH graduated from Harvard Medical School and completed her residency in Family Medicine at Boston Medical Center. Since 2013 she has worked with the non-profit organization Wuqu’ Kawoq (Maya Health Alliance), which provides health care for rural indigenous Maya communities in Guatemala including comprehensive women’s health services family planning and cervical cancer screening.
After residency Kirsten went on to the Global Women’s Health Fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital | Harvard Medical School. Her research focuses on improving the quality family planning services for marginalized women, developing innovative models to reduce maternal mortality, and using implementation science to improve the cervical cancer care continuum in low-resource settings. She divides her time between Hospitalist Medicine at Boston Medical Center and global women’s health research and program implementation. Currently she is an Assistant Professor at Boston University School of Medicine, Research Fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Director of Women’s Health at Wuqu’ Kawoq.
Dominique P. Béhague
Dominique P. Béhague is a social anthropologist and critical health scholar. She is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies of Medicine, Health and Society at Vanderbilt University. During the summer term, she is Reader at the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London. Béhague’s research investigates psychiatric reform, mental health care provision, reproductive health and the politics of evidence-based medicine. Her long-term research in Southern Brazil explores the intersection of psychiatry, politics and adolescent development. For this, she designed and conducted, together with colleagues at the Federal University of Pelotas in Brazil, one of only a handful of ongoing mixed-methods ethnographic and epidemiological longitudinal studies to take place in a country in the so-called Global South. With grants from agencies such as the US National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the World Health Organization, the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and The Wellcome Trust, she has published over 40 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, and edited three special issues (Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry (2008), Social Science and Medicine (2015), and Medical Anthropology Quarterly (2020) the flagship journal of the Society for Medical Anthropology). Her research has influenced policy-development for social equity and health reform within institutions such as the World Health Organization, The Population Council, and The World Bank.
Anita Berlin
Professor Anita Berlin is an inner London GP and Professor of Primary Care Education at Queen Mary College, London. She combines clinical practice with her academic interests in medical education in community settings, with expertise in curriculum design (and the nature of professional knowledge), teaching quality and institutional governance in the UK and internationally. Her thesis investigated patient and public engagement in medical education. She has a Masters and Doctorate in Education for London’s Institute of Education (UCL). She has used the practical application of theoretical models to address educational challenges - such as in recent teaching developments focusing on improving professional practice regarding the social determinants of health, health equity and access to healthcare for migrants.She has worked with third sector organisations supporting and advocating for unpaid carers, and supporting survivors of trafficking and torture. She has contributed long-term external expert advice for primary care training and capacity building in Palestine (6 years – on going) and Spain (3 years) as well as shorter links with Poland, Brazil, Uzbekistan, Israel and Mexico; and was a member of the Board of Visitors of Harvard School of Public Health 2012-14. She is bilingual in Spanish/English.
Philippe Bourgois
Philippe Bourgois, PhD is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities in the Semel Institute of the Department of Psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles. He was the founding chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (1999-2004). He initiated the Anthropology PhD tracks for the MD/PhD training programs at both the UCSF and the University of Pennsylvania medical schools. He has published over a 150 articles on the US inner city health risk environment since the mid-1980s. His publications include multiple award-winning books: In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio and Righteous Dopefiend as well as a half-dozen co-edited volumes and special issues of journals, including Violence in War and Peace and Violence at the Urban Margins. He is currently co-authoring a book entitled Cornered with Laurie Hart, George Karandinos and Fernando Montero on the carceral and psychiatric mis-management of inner city poverty.
Joel Braslow
Joel Braslow is a professor in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and the Department of History. He directs the Social Science Track in the UCLA-Caltech Medical Sciences Training Program. His work examines the social, cultural, historical, and scientific context of mental health policy and treatment practices for severe mental illness. He is author of Mental Ills and Bodily Cures: Psychiatric Treatment in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (1997) and is currently working on a “biography” of schizophrenia for Johns Hopkins University Press. He also currently co-leads a project to assess involuntary outpatient treatment for individuals with severe mental illness in Los Angeles County. He and his collaborator, Philippe Bourgois, also are examining the ways in which individuals with severe mental illness have become so vulnerable to homelessness and incarceration. Braslow received his BS in Biology from Stanford University, his MD from Loma Linda University, and his PhD from UCLA.
Hector Carrasco
Hector Carrasco is a physician and public health professional with degrees from the Tecnologico de Monterrey (ITESM) and Johns Hopkins University, with a strong interest in health systems strengthening through community engagement. After finishing his MD, Hector went to work as a physician with Partners In Health (PIH) in a mountainous community in the poorest state of Mexico, Chiapas. There, he devoted himself to primary health care interventions in child malnutrition and maternal health. After a year, Hector transitioned to be the Community Programs Coordinator at PIH Mexico where, based on the high burden of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), here co-founded and implemented a community health worker program to offer accompaniment and improve clinical outcomes for 500 patients with chronic diseases in rural communities.
Currently, Hector is a DrPH candidate at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Carrasco believes that to effectively manage the most pressing public health challenges in the 21st century, is necessary to create synergy and collaboration between experts, public servants, and community members.
Diana Coffa, MD (University of California, San Francisco)
Anita Chary
Anita Chary, MD PhD, is an anthropologist and resident physician at the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency. She is the Research Director of Wuqu' Kawoq | Maya Health Alliance, a non-governmental organization that provides free health care in Guatemala; former editor-in-chief and current contributor to the Global Health Hub; and author of the book Privatization and the New Medical Pluralism: Shifting Healthcare Landscapes in Guatemala.
Shaheen Chowdhury, MBBS, DPM, DNB 
Shaheen Chowdhury, MBBS, DPM, DNB has been trained in Psychiatry and Family Medicine in India. Until recently, she was working as a Senior Resident at Jan Swasthya Sahyog (People’s Health Support Group) in rural Chhattisgarh, India.
Fernando DeMaio
I am a sociologist specializing in the social determinants of health. Much of my work has revolved around the “income inequality hypothesis”, an idea that suggests that our health is dependent not just on our own income or our family’s income – but on how income is distributed in our communities. I have also conducted work on the effects of discrimination on the health of immigrants in Canada. I teach courses on health equity, global health, social epidemiology, and statistical analysis. I have authored two books, Health & Social Theory (2010) and Global Health Inequities: A Sociological Perspective (2014) and have a co-edited book titled The Chicago Health Equity Reader forthcoming in 2019. I currently also serve as an associate editor of Health Sociology Review.
Yusupha Dibba
Yusupha is a physician and a Master of Medical Sciences in Global Health Delivery (MMSc-GHD) candidate at Harvard Medical School (2020). He is passionate about social justice and health equity. He spent the five years prior to his masters in rural Sierra Leone addressing issues on health inequity facing vulnerable poor people. Yusupha joined the Wellbody Alliance; a local non-profit healthcare non-governmental organization, as its medical director in 2013 in Sierra Leone. His responsibilities included clinical care and management of the largest non-governmental HIV/AIDS and TB programs in Sierra Leone. During the West Africa Ebola outbreak (2013-2016), Yusupha continued his work at Wellbody Alliance’s Clinic and ensured that none of its healthcare workers were infected with Ebola. After the Ebola outbreak, he transitioned to Partners In Health; an international social justice non-governmental organization, where his clinical responsibilities shifted towards capacity building and quality improvement at Koidu Government Referral Hospital in Kono District, Sierra Leone. His research interest is focused on political-economy, biosocial factors and social determinants of health.
Sue Estroff
Sue E. Estroff, Ph.D. is Professor in the Department of Social Medicine, School of Medicine, and research professor in the departments of Anthropology and Psychiatry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Research areas: cultural approaches to psychosis; sociocultural factors that influence the course of psychiatric disorders; reconsidering the association of violence with persons with psychiatric disorders; contested subjectivities in psychiatry and disability medicine; and early intervention in schizophrenia. She is co-director of the Social and Health Systems Sciences four year curriculum in the UNC School of Medicine. She is a co-editor of The Social Medicine Reader, 1st,2nd, and 3rd editions. Recent publications include: Tools to Assess Behavioral and Social Science Competencies in Medical Education: A Systematic Review; Risk Reconsidered: targets of violence in the social networks of people with serious psychiatric disorders; Recognizing and Responding To Early Psychosis: A Qualitative Analysis Of Individual Narratives; Psychological well-being and mental health recovery in the NIMH RAISE early treatment program; From Stigma to Discrimination: An Analysis of Community Efforts to Reduce the Negative Consequences of a Psychiatric Disorder and Label; Ironic Interventions? Balancing Risks and Rewards in First Episode Psychosis via Qualitative Inquiry; Schizophrenia, Violence, and Crime; Confidentiality: Concealing “Things Shameful to be Spoken About”; Directions for Future Patient-Centered and Comparative Effectiveness Research for People With Serious Mental Illness in a Learning Mental Health Care System.Schizophrenia Bulletin Volume 40, January 2014. Incomes and Outcomes: Social Security Disability Benefits in First-Episode Psychosis; Psychological well-being and mental health recovery in the NIMH RAISE early treatment program
Michele Friedner
Michele Friedner is a medical anthropologist and an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her current book project provisionally titled "Becoming Normal: Cochlear Implants, (Re)distribution, and Rehabilitation in India" looks at state programs providing cochlear implants to below-poverty-line children and the emergence of a private cochlear implant market in India. She is interested in how cochlear implants create new categories and experiences in relation to deafness.
Mindy Fullilove
Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, Hon AIA, is a professor of urban policy and health at The New School. Prior to joining The New School in 2016, she worked for 26 years as a research psychiatrist at New York State Psychiatric Institute and was a professor of clinical psychiatry and public health at Columbia University. She has conducted research on AIDS and other epidemics of poor communities, with a special interest in the relationship between the collapse of communities and decline in health. From her research, she has published numerous articles, book chapters, and monographs. She has also written: The House of Joshua: Meditations on Family and Place, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It, and Urban Alchemy: Restoring Joy in America’s Sorted-Out Cities. A second edition of Homeboy Came to Orange: A Story of People's Power, which she helped her father, Ernest Thompson, write, will be released in May 2018 by New Village Press.
Deliana Garcia
Deliana (Del) has worked for 30 years to meet the health care needs of migrant workers and other underserved mobile populations. With expertise in reproductive health, access to primary care, chronic care management and infectious disease control and prevention, Del is responsible for the development of MCN’s Health Network,a global system of bridge case management to provide continuity of care and health records transfer across international border for migrants. She serves as a liaison between the governmental and nongovernmental health organizations of the United States and other countries.
Tinashe Goronga
Tinashe Goronga is a Socmed Uganda Alumni 2015 and completed his Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor in Surgery (MBChB) at the University of Zimbabwe College of Health Sciences in 2016. He is passionate about social justice and health equity and serves on the coordination committee for the Social Medicine Consortium's Global Campaign Against Racism. He also serves on the board of Sexual Rights Centre a Zimbabwean organisation which works with sex workers and sexual minorities. He is currently a General Medical Officer at Binga District Hospital in Zimbabwe and MPH candidate (2020) at the Antwerp Institute of Tropical Medicine
Carrie Griffin
Carrie Griffin, DO is a family medicine physician. She completed residency at the Maine Dartmouth Family Medicine Residency and has recently completed a fellowship in Maternal, Child and Reproductive health at the University of New Mexico. She received a Masters of Public Health certificate from UNM. Her clinical interests include substance abuse in pregnancy, structural competency, migrant farmworker health, reproductive justice and integrative medicine. In July 2018, she will be practicing in Humboldt County, California where she will work at the United Indian Health Services as well as starting a prenatal substance abuse clinic within the community.
Lisa Harris
Lisa Harris, MD, PhD, is the F. Wallace and Janet Jeffries Collegiate Professor of Reproductive Health, and Associate Professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the Department of Women's Studies at University of Michigan. She also directs University of Michigan's Fellowship in Family Planning. After college and medical school at Harvard University, she completed her residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at University of California, San Francisco. Because so many issues in women's reproductive health have to do as much with culture and politics as with biomedical sciences, she went on to earn a PhD in American Culture at University of Michigan. She is now an active clinician, teacher and researcher. Her clinical work includes most aspects of general ob-gyn care, with a focus on miscarriage and family planning. She teaches across disciplines at University of Michigan, in the undergraduate College, Medical School, Law School and School of Public Health. Her research is similarly interdisciplinary, focusing on medical history and sociology. In particular her work explores abortion stigma, the experiences of abortion care providers, exercise of conscience in healthcare, clinical and ethical consequences of restrictive abortion policy, as well as the intersection of abortion politics with federal research policy. She and her team at University of Michigan designed the only evidence-based stigma intervention for abortion providers, and it has been successfully implemented in the United States, and in multiple countries in Latin America and East Africa. She is the recipient of a variety of awards for her research and advocacy, including the Association of Reproductive Health Professional's "Preserving Core Values in Science” Award. She is a two-time recipient of the Society of Family Planning’s Outstanding Researcher Award.
David Jones
David Jones completed his Ph.D. in History of Science at Harvard University and M.D. at Harvard Medical School in 2001. After an internship in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital and Boston Medical Center, he trained as a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospital, and then worked for two years as a staff psychiatrist in the Psychiatric Emergency Service at Cambridge Hospital. He joined the faculty at MIT in 2005 as an Assistant Professor of the History and Culture of Science and Technology. In 2011 he became the inaugural A. Bernard Ackerman Professor of the Culture of Medicine at Harvard University. His initial research focused on epidemics among American Indians (Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600, Harvard University Press, 2004). His next project examined the history of decision making in cardiac therapeutics (Broken Hearts: The Tangled History of Cardiac Care, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). He has also published widely in the New England Journal of Medicine, American Journal of Public Health, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, and the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. His research has been supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently at work on three other histories, of the evolution of coronary artery surgery, of heart disease and cardiac therapeutics in India, and of the threat of air pollution to health. His teaching at Harvard College and Harvard Medical School explores the history of medicine, medical ethics, and social medicine.
Ippy Kalofonos
Dr. Kalofonos is a medical anthropologist and psychiatrist whose work focuses on inequality and health and the ways institutions, individuals, and communities conceptualize, interface with, and enact different forms of care. He is an assistant professor in the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities at the Semel Institute and in the UCLA International Institute, and an attending psychiatrist in the West LA VAMC. He is currently involved in projects looking at individual, family, and community perceptions and experiences of first episode psychosis in the Latinx community of San Fernando Valley and evaluating the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health Assisted Outpatient Treatment program. His past research has investigated AIDS treatment interventions in Mozambique, particularly focusing on experiences of hunger and the role of livelihood in recovery from AIDS, as well as immigrant health on the San Diego-Tijuana border and leptospirosis epidemics in Salvador, Brazil. An article from his work in Mozambique has been honored with both the Rudolph Virchow Award and the Charles Hughes Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology. He has a forthcoming book with University of California Press entitled All I Eat is ARVs: Navigating the AIDS Economy in Central Mozambique.
George Karandinos
George Karandinos is an MD/PhD student in Anthropology at Harvard University. He is currently co-authoring a book, Cornered, for Princeton University Press with Philippe Bourgois, Fernando Montero and Laurie Hart based on ethnographic fieldwork on an active heroin and cocaine corner in the heart of inner city Philadelphia's open-air narcotics market where George lived for four and a half years prior to beginning medical school.
Jennifer Karlin
Jennifer Karlin, MD/PhD has worked at the intersection of health and social medicine as a public policy analyst, journalist, advocate and physician. Currently, she is finishing her residency in Family and Community Medicine at UCSF where she cares for a population who struggles with economic and social vulnerabilities including patients with high rates of mental health illnesses, substance abuse, and problems with immigration and housing instability. She completed her PhD in the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science (CHSS), a Masters in Anthropology, and a Fellowship in Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago. Jennifer’s work focuses on how historical, economic and social shifts in medical knowledge and practice disproportionately affect vulnerable individuals. Her dissertation was an analysis of an urban health program in Chicago that aimed to integrate non-University affiliated community members into the research and decision-making plans of an academic hospital upon the historical backdrop of institutional racism. Specifically, her work explores the difficulties and benefits of translational research, community engagement, and the problems of outcomes-based research and funding. She has also written about the ethics of kidney transplantation, decision-making in end stage renal disease, and the training paths for MD/PhDs in the social sciences and humanities.
Hadrian Kinnear
Hadrian Kinnear is an MD-PhD student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His Ph.D. work is in the Cellular & Molecular Biology Program in the lab of Ariella Shikanov, where he is looking at the impact and reversibility of androgens on reproductive potential. He has also been deeply involved with LGBTQ health efforts at the University of Michigan, including co-founding the UM LGBTQ Health Network, co-creating a Transgender Medicine Elective, and as a former leader of the LGBTQ medical student group.
Kelly Knight
Kelly Ray Knight, PhD is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at University of California – San Francisco (UCSF). She has conducted over two decades of qualitative health research focusing on drug use/addiction, structural vulnerability, health care utilization, HIV/AIDS, mental health diagnoses, reproductive health, and housing instability among US urban poor populations. Dr. Knight is currently Principal Investigator of two qualitative studies funded by the National Institutes of Health. Examining the Consequences of Reductions in Opioid Prescribing on Patients, Clinical Care, and Community Health (RO1DA043631) explores the positive and negative consequences of reductions in opioid prescribing for chronic non-cancer pain to inform clinical and policy recommendations. Family Assisted Housing for Older Homeless Adults (RO1AG050630), in collaboration with Margot Kushel, MD, examines the role of housing policy and family kinship networks in reducing homelessness. Dr. Knight’s book-length ethnography, addicted.pregnant.poor (Duke University Press, 2015), was awarded the British Sociological Association’s Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness (FSHI) 2016 Book Award, was a finalist for the 2015 C. Wright Mills Award, and received an Honorable Mention for the Society of Medical Anthropology’s Eileen Basker 2016 Book Prize.
Timothy Laux
Tim Laux, MD, MPH previously completed Internal Medicine Residency training at Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, USA and later a global health equity fellowship (the HEAL Initiative) through the University of California San Francisco, splitting time between the Navajo (Dine) Nation and rural India. He has previous experience working with Chronic Kidney Disease of Non-Traditional Causes (CKDnT) in Nicaragua and Guatemala. His clinical and research interests include critical care in low resource settings and tuberculosis epidemiology, treatment, and treatment resistance patterns.
Laszlo Madaras
Laszlo Madaras, MD is the Co-Chief Medical Officer for Migrant Clinicians Network (MCN). Dr. Madaras spent his early childhood in Hungary and Sweden, arriving in the USA in 1968 at the age of seven. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in biochemistry in 1983, and went on to join a research team that investigated proteins involved in muscular dystrophy at the Boston Biomedical Research Institute. Dr. Madaras served three years in the Peace Corps in Congo (Zaire) as a regional fisheries coordinator, and then as a PC Country Desk Assistant for Ghana/Liberia/Sierra Leone in Washington, DC.
Dr. Madaras received his MD and Masters in Public Health from Tufts University School of Medicine in 1993, and worked in Gabon, West Africa as an Albert Schweitzer Fellow in pediatrics. Later he worked with the American Refugee Committee on the Congo/Rwandan border during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He also worked on the Hungarian border with former Yugoslavia in 1995.
Since 1996, Dr. Madaras has worked in both inpatient and outpatient medicine in Pediatrics, Adult Medicine and Obstetrics in Chambersburg, PA at the Keystone Health Center which included treating mobile agricultural workers. In 2016 he became a Senior Fellow of Hospital Medicine. In addition, Dr. Madaras has worked with MCN's Dr. Zuroweste as a staff physician in Tuberculosis control at the Pennsylvania State Health Department since 2012, and regularly teaches American medical students on an international health rotation in Honduras.
Carlos Martinez
Carlos Martinez, MPH is a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow and Ph.D. student in the joint program in Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco. His research explores the intersections between medicine, biocitizenship, coloniality, and structural vulnerability in the United States and Latin America. In previous research, he has explored how politically-structured health inequities impact marginalized communities and the ways that various agents, such as social movements, attempt to intervene upon these forces. His current work examines the intersecting and contradictory logics of containment, rehabilitation, repatriation, and carceral violence ensnaring Mexican deportees living in Tijuana.
Margareta (Magda) Matache
Dr. Margareta (Magda) Matache is an activist and scholar from Romania, director of the Roma Program at Harvard FXB, and also a Harvard instructor. In 2012, she was awarded a Hauser postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard FXB and founded the Roma Program. She co-edited Realizing Roma Rights (U Penn Press, 2017) with Jacqueline Bhabha and Andrzej Mirga. The volume investigates anti-Roma racism and documents a growing Roma-led political movement engaged in building a more inclusive and just Europe. From 2005 to 2012 Matache was the executive director of Romani CRISS, a leading NGO that defends and promotes the rights of Roma.
She completed her doctoral research work in the early childhood development of Romani children at the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Bucharest, and holds a Master’s degree in Public Administration from Harvard Kennedy School. Her publications and research have covered participatory action research, reparations, Roma rights, early childhood development, racism, and discrimination, including segregation in education.
Luke Messac
Luke Messac is a physician and a historian. His research focuses on the histories of health policy in Africa and the United States. He is currently a Resident in Emergency Medicine at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. His work investigates the causes and consequences of scarcity in medical care. Subjects of recent research have included the effects of homelessness on health, international systems of opiate rationing, histories of population control, hepatitis C diagnostic techniques, and the contribution of medicine to population-level mortality declines. He has published in Social Science and Medicine, the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and the Journal of Policy History, among others. He has also co-authored chapters in Reimagining Global Health: An Introduction (University of California, 2013), and Therapeutic Revolutions: Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the 20th Century (University of Chicago, 2016). Luke received his BA from Harvard University (Social Studies, 2008), his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (History and Sociology of Science, 2016), and his MD from the University of Pennsylvania (2018).
Sandy Mux
Sandy Mux is a nurse and manager of Women's Health and Diabetes Programming with Wuqu' Kawoq | Maya Health Alliance, a non-governmental organization that provides free health care in rural underserved indigenous communities of Guatemala. Sandy graduated with a degree in professional nursing from the University Rafael Landivar, Guatemala. She has been working with Wuqu' Kawoq for six years.
Cindy Ochieng
Dr. Cindy Ochieng is a Public Health and Preventive Medicine Resident Physician at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada and is passionate about listening to and understanding stories from those experiencing social inequity to inform health research, practice and problem solving. Inequity underlies the most complex social issues affecting the world today, and she believes it must be addressed when working to improve the public’s health. Her multidisciplinary educational background, personal interests and genuine curiosity equip her with a unique ability to appreciate and consider different perspectives when engaging in clinical work and research. This includes training in media, music and art.
Her educational background includes a Master of Public Health at University of California Berkeley and a Master of Arts in Anthropology at University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada. She has a Doctor of Medicine from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada and a Bachelor of Science from Mount Allison University in Sackville, Canada.
Kathleen Page
Dr. Kathleen Page, MD, is an Associate Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her work focuses on improving access and quality of care to the emerging Latino community in Baltimore. Her practice in the Moore Clinic and at the Baltimore City Health Department serves Latin American immigrants with HIV. She has established the Latino HIV Outreach Program at the Baltimore City Health Department which collaborates with various local community based organizations to improve timely HIV diagnosis and access to care for Latinos. She co-founded Centro SOL (Center for Salud/Health and Opportunities for Latinos) which is developing novel strategies to meet the health needs of Latino migrants through research, education, community advocacy, and clinical care. She is also the Baltimore City Health Department’s Director of STD/HIV/HCV/TB Clinical Services.
Dr. Page was selected by the Johns Hopkins Institutions Diversity Leadership Council to receive a 2013 Diversity Recognition Award. In 2014, she received the Mayor’s Hispanic Heritage Award and the Johns Hopkins President’s Award in recognition of her work with the Latino community in Baltimore. Together with Sarah Polk, co-Director of Centro SOL, they received the 2016 Clinical Excellence Award for their innovative, community-based approach to expanding health care access to immigrant families in Baltimore.
Kristen Pallok
Kristen Pallok is a fourth year medical student at Rush Medical College in Chicago, Illinois. As a Rush University Medical Center Health Disparities Research Intern, she has worked with the Metropolitan Chicago Breast Cancer Taskforce to investigate the impact of mammography inequality in Chicago on the racial breast cancer mortality gap. She has also worked with Chicago’s undocumented and uninsured immigrant population to help secure a path for kidney transplants in Illinois. She is the principal co-contributor for researching and editing The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Following her graduation from medical school, she plans to pursue a career in internal medicine.
Sarah Polk
Sarah Polk MD, ScM, MHS serves as a bilingual (English/Spanish) primary care pediatrician and Medical Director of the Children’s Medical Practice. She is as Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins’ School of Medicine. Her overall research interest is optimizing primary care as a means of addressing racial/ethnic health disparities with a particular focus on early childhood obesity prevention and mental health care. Her work as a clinician has familiarized her with the challenges of providing high quality health care to Latino children of immigrants with Limited English Proficiency who comprise the majority of the patient population at the Children’s Medical Practice. This has led to hear involvement in a number of collaborative efforts to address healthcare quality concerns. For example, the Bayview Children’s Medical Practice Latino Family Advisory Board has sustained participation among immigrant, Latina mothers and provided ongoing, applicable feedback to the practice. Finally, she and colleagues established the Center for Salud/Health and Opportunity for Latinos (Centro SOL). The mission of Centro SOL is to promote equity in health and opportunity for Latinos by advancing clinical care, research, education, and advocacy at Johns Hopkins and beyond in active partnership with our Latino neighbors. Furthermore, the Center’s vision is that all Latinos receive culturally competent healthcare that acknowledges the diversity of the community and respects the dignity of each individual. The effort to address mental health and psychosocial concerns as part of pediatric primary care at the Children’s Medical Practice is an example of the cross-disciplinary work that Centro SOL is intended to promote. Dr. Polk received her undergraduate degree at Amherst College, her medical degree at Johns Hopkins and training in Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Ashish Premkumar
Ashish Premkumar, MD FACOG is a third year maternal-fetal medicine fellow at Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, as well as a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University. He completed his BA and MD through the Seven-Year Liberal Arts/Medical Education at Boston University. He completed his residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at University of California, San Francisco. His research interests include perinatal substance use, preterm birth, hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, the social (after)life of clinical trials, affective economy, and the anthropology of care.
Michael Ralph
Michael Ralph is a medical anthropologist whose research centers on forensics, debt, slavery, insurance, and incarceration. He is the author of the 2015 University of Chicago Press book, Forensics of Capital, as well as the writer, producer, and director of the short, animated, musical Fishing, about how ingenuity cannot be incarcerated. Michael is also responsible for the Treasury of Weary Souls, the world's most comprehensive ledger of insured slaves.
Elizabeth Roberts
Elizabeth F.S. Roberts, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, is an ethnographer of science, medicine, and technology. My work has included research on assisted reproduction in the United States and Ecuador, reproductive governance in Latin America, transnational medical migrations, and, currently, environmental health science in the United States and Mexico. I am the Director of two ongoing team-based projects in Mexico City: “Mexican Exposures: A Bioethnographic Approach to Health and Inequality” and “Neighborhood Environments as Socio-Techno-bio Systems: Water Quality, Public Trust, and Health in Mexico City” (NESTSMX). In these projects my team and I trace the looping life conditions that shape bodily relations, challenging the notion of biology as fixed, universal, and apolitical.
David Scales
David Scales is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and a Hospitalist Clinical Scholar at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Previously, he was medical sociologist and research fellow with the Centers for Disease Control and HealthMap.org, an online tool for real-time epidemic surveillance based at the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program at Harvard Medical School, developing an iPad application to enable the US Centers for Disease Control to assess geographically based risk incorporating information on social determinants of health, migration, and infectious diseases. Trained in Internal Medicine with interests in refugee health locally and in the Middle East, David developed the website www.refugeography.org connecting refugees to services in Boston and has worked clinically with refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and the West Bank. Most recently he co-founded a Community Health Worker program addressing trauma and non-communicable diseases in Bethlehem with local NGO partner Markaz Lajee (Refugee Center).
Claire Hutkins Seda
Claire Hutkins Seda is Writer and Editor for Migrant Clinicians Network, where she focuses on health justice for the mobile poor. Ms. Seda has written and edited for a variety of publications, both in-print and online, on issues of environmental and social justice.
Cheryl Seymour
Cheryl K. Seymour, MD is a full-spectrum family physician practicing and teaching medicine in central Maine. After studying Biomedical Engineering at Duke University, she graduated from the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College in 2001. Cheryl completed her family medicine residency at the Greater Lawrence Family Health Center in Lawrence, Massachusetts followed by a fellowship in geriatrics in Maine. She has continued to live in Maine after fellowship, joining the faculty of the Maine-Dartmouth Family Medicine Residency in Augusta. Since 2009 Cheryl has also been the medical director of the Maine Mobile Health Program, a state-wide mobile FQHC that serves exclusively migrant and seasonal farm-workers.
Over the past 15 years my professional passion has become the merging of medical education and farmworker health by introducing learners to labor camps, mobile clinics and a model of care grounded in a team of community health workers. I also enjoy sharing the stories of farmworkers in a residency teaching setting in order to illustrate key concepts in social medicine. Participating in this collaborative writing project has been an amazing opportunity and I look forward to learning more from this community!
Daphna Stroumsa
Daphna Stroumsa is an obstetrician-gynecologist and research fellow in the National Clinician Scholars Program at the University of Michigan. Stroumsa’s work focuses on addressing the health needs of gender and sexual minorities. Her research concentrates on issues affecting LGBTQ people’s access to care, with particular interests in interactions with healthcare providers and in the intersections of reproductive justice and queer health. In her work, she is committed to bridging LGBTQ community activism with health services research and advocacy.
Stroumsa obtained her medical degree from Hebrew University - Hadassah Medical School, after which she did three years of training in obstetrics and gynecology at Hadassah University Hospital. During her training in Israel, Stroumsa has spearheaded several community-based projects to advance LGBTQ health.
Stroumsa obtained a Masters in Public Health (in Health Management and Policy) at the University of Michigan, where she researched federal- and state-level policies affecting transgender people’s access to care. While completing a residency in obstetrics and gynecology at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Stroumsa was involved in several regional initiatives to improve LGBTQ health access, including as a member of the Southeast Michigan Health Equity Council, and as a founding member of the Henry Ford Health System transgender health interest group.
Carolyn Sufrin
Carolyn Sufrin, MD, PhD, is a medical anthropologist and an obstetrician-gynecologist specializing in family planning at Johns Hopkins University, where she is assistant professor in the Department of Gyn/Ob at the School of Medicine and in Health, Behavior and Society at the School of Public Health. She has worked extensively on reproductive health issues affecting incarcerated women, from providing clinical care in jail, to research, policy, and advocacy. Her work is situated at the intersection of reproductive justice, health care, and mass incarceration, which she examines in her recent book, Jailcare: Finding the Safety Net for Women Behind Bars.
Marek Szilvasi
Marek Szilvasi, PhD. is a Team Manager with the Open Society Public Health Program, where he focuses on ethnicity and health equality and Roma health. Marek has extensive experience as an advocate, researcher, and academic working on the rights, justice, and inclusion of Roma in Europe. Prior to joining Open Society Foundations, he was the Head of research and human rights education at the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC), where he managed research projects, supported strategic litigation, and conducted advocacy at national and international levels. Marek has been also a lecturer in sociology, philosophy, and public health at universities in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia, and a visiting researcher at universities in India, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Bulgaria, and Croatia,. He holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Aberdeen, UK. Marek’s recent publications can be accessed at his Academia.edu profile.
Michael Westerhaus
Michael Westerhaus aims to understand and respond to structural forces that create social conditions leading to health inequities. As a primary care clinician at the Center for International Health, he bears witness to and supports refugee efforts to draw on social and cultural assets to seek health. As an educator with the organization SocMed and as an Assistant Professor of Global Medicine at the University of Minnesota, he utilizes experiential and action-based methods to teach social medicine that elevates the critical consciousness of health professionals. He also serves as Program Director for the BRIIDGE program, which prepares international medical graduates for successful entry into U.S. residency training programs. As co-founder of the Social Medicine Consortium, he leads efforts with a global community of educators who merge transformative pedagogy with strategic community organizing to mobilize power for advancing health equity. He is a current Macy Faculty Scholar working on designing, implementing, institutionalizing, and evaluating an experiential social medicine curriculum on the structural determination of health and how to lead social change for University of Minnesota learners who aspire to be health workers. He received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 2006 and completed the Global Health Equity residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in 2010. He also received a Master’s in medical anthropology from Harvard University in 2005.
Edward Zuroweste
Edward Zuroweste, MD, has over 30 years of experience as a Board-Certified Family Physician focused on the care of underserved populations in the US, namely migrant and seasonal farmworkers. For 20 years, Dr. Zuroweste maintained a full-time clinical practice in family practice and obstetrics in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, first in private practice and later as the Medical Director of a Migrant/ Community Health Center. Dr. Zuroweste was a founding member, and current Co-Chief Medical Officer of the Migrant Clinicians Network. He is the Tuberculosis Medical Consultant for the Pennsylvania Department of Health and serves as the attending physician for seven PA State Health Department TB Clinics. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine where he has directed an international health elective for medical students in Honduras in the past. During the Ebola Epidemic (Oct/Nov 2014) he was hired as a medical consultant by the WHO and participated as part of the WHO Ebola Response Team in both Guinea and Sierra Leone where he trained over 200 Cuban physicians and nurses to prepare them to work in Ebola treatment centers in those countries. In March 2017 he was one of a large team of physicians and nurses who participated in a CDC/WHO project to screen all 6,000 adults on the small island of Ebeye in the Marshall Islands for TB, Leprosy, DM and HTN. He returned to the Marshall Islands in August 2018 for a similar larger project to screen over 24,000 individuals on the island of Majuro.
