In my capacity as Vice Chair of the Department and Professor in the joint Program in Medical Anthropology (with UC Berkeley), I am committed to making a contribution to knowledge and insight about the interface between health and the capacity for a flourishing life. I directed the graduate programs at Princeton University (1992-2000) and at UCSF (2000-2012) and continue to advise and mentor many graduate students, and I remain devoted to administrative service to further the mission of UCSF. I have published seven books and numerous articles on a wide range of anthropological topics, including: Asian Medical Systems, Reproductive Health, Global Health, Disaster Recovery, Postcolonial Social Theory, Politics of Knowledge, Climate Change, Chemical Harm, and Industrial Food Systems. I am the current editor of Medical Anthropology Quarterly, the flagship journal for the Society for Medical Anthropology. I am co-editor (with Joao Biehl) of the book series Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography with Duke University Press.

Through national and international collaborations, my scholarly research has always focused on the compromise to flourishing life under conditions of duress. This began with an exploration of how mountaineering and tourism in Nepal produced morbid aspirations among Sherpas of the Everest region. In later work, I documented how the entanglement of politics and medicine in Nepal created a democratic revolution that left a nation nearly entirely dependent on foreign aid in a state of persistent unrest and conflict. In Tibet, my research on women’s health and Tibetan medicine documented how socialist modernity and persistent political surveillance was internalized as assault on sacred conceptualizations of the body, the family, the nation. My work in Tibet also explored the capacity for well-intentioned interventions in safe-motherhood could undermine urgent forms of care and response. This led to a larger body of work tracing the birth of Global Health from its predecessor, International Health, in relation to the deleterious effects of a rising mandate and reliance on quantitative metrics, especially the randomized-controlled trial. In the US, my focus has been on how conditions of neoliberal policy translate into second-order disasters in relation to recovery post-disaster. This includes a book about the effects of disaster capitalism in post-Katrina New Orleans, and also a study in how reliance on volunteerism and charity to reproduce the safety net, including the use of an affective surplus, ultimately undermines resilience and recovery. My current research explores the rise of uncertainty in science in relation to chemical harm, particularly from agrochemical industrial food and food systems. This work has prompted an exploration of the arts of speculation, as well as an investigation of how to teach medical students about the value of food system knowledge.