Vincanne Adams is Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She has written and edited numerous books in medical anthropology, including Sex and Development: Science, Sexuality and Morality in Global Perspective (coedited with Stacy Leigh Pigg) also published by Duke University Press.
Aude Bouagnon
Liz Dzeng
Dr. Dzeng is a sociologist and hospitalist physician conducting research at the nexus of sociology, medical ethics, palliative care, health equity, anti-racism, and human-centered design. She is an Associate Professor "In Residence" at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in the Division of Hospital Medicine and Social and Behavioral Sciences, Sociology program, Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. She spends her time between San Francisco and London where she is a Senior Research Fellow at the Cicely Saunders Institute at King's College London. She is also a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health, a Visiting Research Fellow at Kings College London’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, and a Visiting Assistant Professor in General Internal Medicine at UCLA.
Dr. Dzeng completed her PhD in Medical Sociology and an MPhil in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge at King’s College as a Gates Cambridge Scholar where she wrote her doctoral thesis on the influence of institutional cultures and policies on physicians’ ethical beliefs and how that impacted the way they communicate in end of life decision-making conversations. Her research program focuses on using sociological and human centered design methods to understand how institutional cultures and policies influence clinical practice patterns and how to change institutional culture to improve the quality of care. Her other major research focus is around using community-based participatory research methods to understand how structural racism across the life course influences the provision of quality end-of-life care in older Black adults.
Nadia Gaber received her PhD from the joint program in medical anthropology from UCSF and UC Berkeley, and is obtaining her MD at UCSF with support from the National Institutes of Health and Medical Scientist Training Program. Her research on the politics of urban health and safety in the U.S. considers how the social and material legacies of industrial capitalism flow between body and environment. Her current book project, based on her dissertation, "Life After Water: Detroit, Flint and the Postindustrial Politics of Health," examines water as a social force through which contemporary biopolitics of race, economy and environment are being reworked. Aligned with grassroots struggles for safe and affordable water, her work explores the cultures of life assembled amidst urban infrastructural disrepair. It combines critical theory and ethnography with community-led participatory research to offer a portrait of the uneven landscapes of late-industrial life.
She is a proud member of We the People of Detroit's Community Research Collective, the Critical Resistance/Oakland Power Projects, and the UCSF Climate Psychiatry Working Group.
Dr. Antoine Johnson earned his Ph.D. in the History of Health Sciences from the University of California, San Francisco. His dissertation, “More than Pushing Pills: Black AIDS Activism in the Bay Area, 1981-1996,” explored ways in which Black grassroots organizers confronted HIV/AIDS and structural-medical racism that exposed their communities to infection. His research interests include the AIDS epidemic, anti-Black racism in medicine, twentieth-century American History, and hip-hop culture.
Lina Khoeur
Joey Lew is a medical student at the University of California, San Francisco. She received an M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2019 and a B.S. in chemistry from Yale University in 2017.
Michelle Martinelli
Carlos Martinez received his PhD from the Joint Program in Medical Anthropology at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley. At UCSF he was affiliated with the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences and at UC Berkeley he was affiliated with the Department of Anthropology. He received his Master of Public Health degree from San Francisco State University's Department of Public Health.
“My research explores the health consequences and sociocultural implications of the deportation regime, asylum deterrence policies, the global drug war, and emergent forms of migrant captivity in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. I am currently developing my first book manuscript, tentatively titled Captive States: Migration and Expulsion on the Carceral Frontier, which ethnographically examines how the U.S. deportation regime and predatory asylum bureaucracies have transformed the U.S.-Mexico borderland region into a zone of captivity for Central American migrants and Mexican deportees. Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork conducted since 2018, this project examines the everyday lives and survival strategies of these communities in Tijuana, Mexico. Moving between migrant and homeless encampments, governmental and private shelters, drug rehabilitation centers, and activist-run medical clinics, this project analyzes the lives of those subjected to intersecting forms of confinement and targeted attrition at the U.S.-Mexico border.”
Jaleel Plummer is in the Joint PhD Program in Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco. His work is broadly interested in how politically mediated atmospheres and technological developments shape communities, psychopathology, and lived experience. With a focus on the black lived experience in Europe and the Caribbean, Jaleel conducts comparative ethnographic research on politicized landscapes, security systems, racial paranoia, and psychosis. In his dissertation project, he will research how the British government produces “hostile environments” in England and Jamaica and how those environments or atmospheres intensify securitization, racial paranoia, and communal fracturing. Jaleel will argue that these atmospheres are breeding grounds for severe mental illnesses and the presence of malevolent spirits found in black Caribbean religions. Black madness and malevolent spirit possession will function as windows for understanding how dispossession, traumatic affliction and communal fracture enable ways for thinking alterity. Jaleel's work is shaped by the clinical, political, and philosophical insights of Frantz Fanon and the anthropological insights of Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Zoé Samudzi is an SEI Fellow and Assistant Professor in Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. She is also a Research Associate with the Center for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg.
Zoé is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, Bookforum, The New Inquiry, The Architectural Review, The New Republic, and other outlets. She is an associate editor with Parapraxis Magazine, a member of the editorial board for […] Ellipses Journal of Creative Research, and was a guest editor at The Funambulist Magazine. She is also a contributing writer at Jewish Currents and co-author of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (AK Press).
She is represented by Alison Lewis at the Francis Goldin Literary Agency.
Alexzandria Simon
Ph.D. Student
M.A. in History (California State University, Sacramento)
The experiences and lives of the LGBTQ community are essential to understanding any history, and the medical experiences of LGBTQ individuals will only add to the growing queer narrative. I want to examine the connection between medicine, science, and the queer community. I want to understand how American medicine shaped and impacted queer lives, and the role science played in shaping gender and sexual identity.
Through this research, my main goal is to create more inclusive spaces in scholarship and academia. When I came out in college, my understanding of history shifted dramatically. I sought out histories and stories that included voices like mine and often found little. Medical history in connection with LGBTQ history will shape how many understand the American narrative.
Bonnie O Wong received her PhD in the joint UC Berkeley/ UCSF program in Medical Anthropology, and her MD from Stanford School of Medicine. Her research interests include global surgery, science and technology studies, Chinese modernity, and clinical communication.
Kara is a highly-experienced qualitative researcher currently enrolled at UCSF/UC Berkeley to pursue a PhD in Medical Anthropology. She has both a Bachelor and a Master’s degree in Anthropology from University of Illinois, Chicago, and CSU, East Bay, respectively. She previously held a staff appointment at NCIRE-The Veterans Health Research Institute, performing qualitative interviews with Veterans to further multiple research projects. She was a Qualitative Analyst for Dr. Rebecca Brown’s VA-funded project “Implementation of Standardized Functional Status Measurement for Older Veterans”, so she is no stranger to the Division of Geriatrics! She has now joined Dr. Theresa Allison’s team, where she will participate in all phases of an IRB-approved, NIH-funded qualitative, music ethnographic study to the potential for music to improve quality of life in dementia caregiving relationships. She will also participate in data analysis and manuscript preparation for a study that has completed data collection and closed enrollment. Her involvement in this lab will serve as a critical entre to the community that she proposes to study prior to beginning her own dissertation work. Her involvement in the project is also critical to accelerate project recruitment following delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as key to furthering her own educational goals.