Welcome, and thanks for visiting!
I’m an award-winning author, anthropologist, professor and editor. My work often addresses challenges people face at the intersections of culture, health, and politics. Much of my research focuses on how people navigate the troubled waters of chronic illness and find strength in the people around them.
I grew up in a small town in northwest Iowa called Okoboji. I wrote a book about it entitled Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji, after spending time with my family during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
I’m currently the Director of the Science, Technology, and International Affairs Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. I am also a co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of a new publication called Science Politics that matches academic rigor with journalistic storytelling to address how scientific knowledge is transformed through politics, culture, society, and environments.
My research hugs the boundaries of anthropology, psychology, medicine, and public health. I have had the privilege of living and working around the world and have published extensively with my colleagues in the U.S., India, South Africa, and Kenya. I have authored several books, including Syndemic Suffering (2012), Rethinking Diabetes (2019), Unmasked (2022), and Invisible Illness (2026) and co-edited Global Mental Health (2015) and Savoring Care (2025). I edited a Special Issue on syndemics in The Lancet and have co-edited Special Issues on migration and health, syndemic theory and methods, and interembodiment. As a public scholar, I have also written for Vox, Scientific American, Think Global Health, Current History, Sapiens, The Conversation, and Scary Mommy.
My new book, Invisible Illness: A History, from Hysteria to Long Covid, has been described as a moving cultural history of disability and a powerful call-to-action to change how our medical system and society supports those with complex chronic conditions. Kirkus Reviews (starred) described it as “a much-need challenge to a monolithic health care system to respond in more humane and holistic ways to the suffering of those facing complicated, long-term health issues.” Read more stories on my Substack: Long Covid: An Anthropological Perspecitve.
In 2017, I was awarded the George Foster Award for Practicing Anthropology from the Society for Medical Anthropology for on syndemics. In 2023, I was awareded a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for my work on COVID-19 and Long Covid.