Photo from left to right: Sara Rendell, Adriana Petryna, Michelle Munyikwa, Josh Franklin, Lee Young, Utpal Sandesara, Caroline Hodge, Ben Sieff, Alex Chen, Randall Burson.

 

The Anthropology Track in the Penn MD-PhD Program/MSTP is dedicated to training physician-anthropologists who will become next-generation leaders in an integrated practice of clinical medicine and social science. Our program recognizes that the modern life sciences involve much more than the generation of knowledge about biological processes. By fostering insight into the entwinement of biomedical knowledge and human society, the MD-PhD Program enables trainees to explore the practices and paradigms that contribute to health inequality, and to innovate clinical and investigative frameworks of moral responsiveness and care.

Exploring the full breadth of anthropological inquiry, MD-PhD trainees are advised and supported during the entirety of their clinical and research training by faculty in Anthropology as well as across the social sciences and humanities. As they carry out ethnographic projects within the United States and across the globe, they are making critical interventions in diverse fields including medical anthropology, science and technology studies, political anthropology, urban studies, and feminist and critical race studies.

Immersed in integrated training at all stages, students develop a practice of inquiry and care that is fully medical and fully anthropological. Because we believe this inquiry is best done in collaboration, the Anthropology Track in the Penn MD-PhD Program draws upon our unique multidisciplinary training and breadth of interests to build a praxis of peer mentorship and support. Together, members of the Penn MSTP Anthropology community are reimagining a critical and politically engaged medicine for the 21st century.

For inquiries about the program, please feel free to contact Dr. Adriana Petryna, Director of the Anthropology Track in the Penn MD-PhD Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

 

News Section

Nipun Kottage was awarded the Penn Prize for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. See https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/2024-penn-prize-excellence-graduate-teaching-celebrated

Ross Perfetti received grants from the National Science Foundation, Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, and the Wenner Gren Foundation for his dissertation fieldwork in 2023-24.

Caroline Hodge received the Association for Feminist Anthropology Dissertation Award for 2023. 

Utpal Sandesara is the Assistant Professor-in-Residence at the UCLA School of Medicine’s Division of General Internal Medicine-Health Services Research & the Global Health program at the UCLA International Institute

Sara Rendell is the lead author on “Integrating ART adherence support technologies in the care of pregnant and postpartum people with HIV: a qualitative study,” published in Implement Sci Commun (2022). She also co-authored “Resculpting Professionalism for Equity and Accountability” (The Annals of Family Medicine, 2022). 

Ankita Reddy is the lead author on “Monoclonal antibody pairs against SARS-CoV-2 for rapid antigen test development,” published in PLoS Negl Trop Dis. (2022) and was just named a Provost’s Graduate Academic Engagement Fellow at the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at Penn (2023). See her work, The Visual Liminal, here. 

Randall Burson has been selected to receive a graduate fellowship with the Penn-Mellon Dispossessions in the Americas research team for the academic year 2023-2024. 

Michelle Munyikwa co-authored “Misrepresenting Race: The Role of Medical Schools in Propagating Physician Bias,” published in The New England Journal of Medicine (2021). 

Together with Anthropology affiliated faculty member, Dr. Justin Clapp, and MD-MSHP student, Olivia Familusi, Randall Burson published a paper in Social Science & Medicine entitled, “Imagining the 'structural' in medical education and practice in the United States: A curricular investigation” (2022). 

Alex Chen was named 2022 Mellon/ American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellow for “Building Biocontainment, Regulating Race: Scientific Infrastructures for American Safety against Emerging Diseases.” 

"The COVID Horizon" essays, guest-edited by Adriana Petryna and Sara Rendell, are out in Medicine, Anthropology, and Theory. UPenn physician-anthropologists trace a different ground from which to anticipate the role of medicine in the 21st century. Intro and link to essays here: http://www.medanthrotheory.org/article/view/5249 

"Training physician-scholars to see patients as people, not categories". https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Penn-anthropology-MD-PhD-graduates-first-students 

Utpal Sandesara, who graduated from the MD-PhD program in 2019, wrote this opinion piece from the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic in LA, where he is doing his residency. https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/04/22/utpal-sandesara-we-need-protect-most-vulnerable-healthcare-workers/

 

Admissions

The admissions process for the MD-PhD program in Anthropology is coordinated through the MD-PhD office.  Admissions decisions are made jointly in an integrated process by the Anthropology Graduate Group, the MD-PhD Program, and the Medical School.  Initially, applicants must submit their application via AMCAS.  In addition to all materials in the AMCAS and Penn MD-PhD supplemental application, there is one additional essay which should be submitted directly to the MD-PhD office.  This is a personal statement which should address the factors that have encouraged you to seek an education from Penn Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, including any significant personal or professional experiences related to your program of study.  The essay should be no more than 1000 words or 6000 characters.   These materials will be used for the review process by the MD-PhD program and the Anthropology Graduate group. For general information about the program, please go to the website: https://www.med.upenn.edu/mstp/. For specific information about the Anthropology track, feel free to reach out to Adriana Petryna, Emily Ng, Deborah Thomas, or Maggie Krall (Director of Administration, Medical Scientist Training Program, Penn Med School); or the Anthropology Graduate Group Coordinator.

 

Current Students

 

Nick Simpson

1st Year MD/PhD 

What did I do before the MD-PhD? 

I graduated from Southern Methodist University in 2023, where I majored in Health and Society within the Department of Anthropology. I spent three years in a biochemistry lab characterizing photoreceptors involved in plant and fungal circadian rhythms. Prior to my junior year, I began ethnographic work which sought to understand Indigenous community radio in Ecuador as a medium for countering colonial modernity, preserving communalist lifeways, and spurring political mobilization across territorial lines.

What's my anthropological project? 

Though still early in my training, I’m interested in working at the intersection of political ecology, environmental health, and critical medical anthropology. For instance: in regions like the Amazonian Basin, how are Indigenous peoples adapting to times of great environmental precarity? How are the downstream consequences of global resource markets and international political entanglements embodied by the individuals and collectives most prone to the dangers of ecosystem loss? Finally, how do climate change and environmentalism relate to the biomedicalization of zones of medical epistemic plurality?  

What are my medical interests?

 I am broadly interested in primary care, though I look forward to gaining exposure and chasing new interests in the clinic.

Want to get in touch? Always happy to talk! Email me at nicholas.simpson@pennmedicine.upenn.edu

 

Montita Sowapark

3rd Year MD/PhD (G1)

What did I do before the MD-PhD?

I was born in Thailand and grew up in South Florida. For my undergraduate degree, I studied Biomedical Engineering and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard. My undergraduate thesis focused on experiences of LGBTQ+ patients in Thailand and medical device design for patients who have received gender-affirming vaginoplasty. Pursuing a joint concentration and writing a joint thesis with committee members across engineering, gender studies, and history of science compelled me to seek a language that engages with the divergent forms of knowledge production across these disciplines. Writings in medical anthropology, I found, best allowed me to explore the relationship between sociality, materiality, and the body. After completing my undergraduate degree, I received an MA in Medical Anthropology from SOAS, University of London on a John Loiello AFSOAS FISHL Scholarship. I then worked as an analyst at a healthcare consulting firm for one and a half years while applying to graduate school. 

What’s my anthropological project?

I am still working through how the first two years of medical school have influenced my personal, intellectual, and academic desires. However, currently I am interested in the nexus of language, medicine, care, and violence. Drawing upon personal experiences translating for my parents at healthcare appointments and recent clinical experiences providing care for patients whose primary language is not English, I am interested in how healthcare providers and systems operationalize language differences across the domains of clinical care, economic interest, and socio-cultural diversity. As such, I am also interested in questions of translation and the tension between translation as a pragmatic clinical tool and the problem of translation (in the humanities and social sciences) as an ever-receding horizon of incommensurability.

What are my medical interests?

Having completed half of my core clerkships prior to starting the PhD, I am currently most interested in OB/GYN and pediatrics.

What to get in touch? Email me at Montita.sowapark@pennmedicine.upenn.edu

 

Ankita Reddy

 5th year MD/PhD Candidate (G3)

 What did I do before the MD-PhD? 

I studied Biology and Anthropology at MIT where I became interested in globally deployed medical technologies. I worked in a lab that developed low-cost rapid diagnostics for dengue, Zika, and chikungunya and helped to field test the diagnostics in Latin America and Asia. In my junior year I worked with my team to create a spin-off startup to further develop and deploy the diagnostics. I continued working as a research scientist and clinical liaison at the startup following graduation, and upon the emergence of COVID-19. I used my lab work and startup experience as an ethnographic entry point to unpack bench-to-bedside development in transnational settings. I also spent time during undergrad and postgraduation exploring experiences of the South Asian diaspora in Boston through multimodal research methods, including movement, documentary, and installation, which have influenced current interests and methodologies.  

 What's my anthropological project? 

My interests center around the multiple visual and digital cultures in healthcare and theoretically lie at the intersection of queer/feminist of color science & technology studies (STS), media studies, and medical anthropology. My dissertation seeks to understand how technologies of human and computer vision, particularly AI medical imaging, are reshaping how clinicians see and act upon social and biological difference. In my fieldwork I study how computer scientists, clinicians, patients, and technology developers sense and make sense of pathology, race, and gender through images and algorithms. As such, I am interested in how digital and computational abstractions of humans interact with the affective and political dimensions of reading bodies as images to render difference legible in the clinic.

 What are my medical interests?

I am currently interested in a variety of specialties including ophthalmology, pulmonology, dermatology, and family medicine!

 

Nipun Kottage

5th year MD/PhD Candidate (G3)

What did I do before the MD-PhD? 

I graduated in 2019 from the University of Maryland with bachelor's degrees in Anthropology and Biochemistry. There, I studied the micro-politics of water infrastructure projects in Ghana and Nicaragua to understand how the relationships, procedures, and expectations within development projects influence the impact and sustainability of wells, pipes, and water towers. During that time, I volunteered as a project manager and was president of the University of Maryland Chapter of Engineers Without Borders. After completing my degree, I worked with the Capital Area Violence Intervention Program, a hospital-based wraparound social service program to support Black men who survive violence. Through dialogue with survivors, my research sought to explore the social and emotional terrain that shape experiences of injury and survivorship. 

What’s my anthropological project? 

I study the aftermaths of- and responses to- state violence through historical and ethnographic research with university student movements in Sri Lanka. I draw upon political and medical anthropology to explore how student movements seek to intervene in multiple forms of structural violence. How are these political projects and practices inherited? How do situated practices constitute a “toolkit” of responses to violence? How does violence and its responses shape the social lives of the University and Democracy?

What are my medical interests? 

I am clinically interested in emergency medicine and internal medicine. I loved my time as a clerkship student at rural primary care sites, taking care of patients in the ICU step down unit, and in the emergency department. Through my practice, I seek to help create health system change to serve socially and medically vulnerable populations. 

Want to get in touch? 

Email me anytime at nipun.kottage@pennmedicine.upenn.edu!

 

Ross Perfetti 

 

Randy Burson

8th Year MD-PhD Candidate

What did I do before the MD-PhD?

Originally from New Mexico, I moved to the Philly area to attend Swarthmore College where I studied Biology and Anthropology. After undergrad, I completed a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Chile focused on intercultural mental health services. I also carried out research on clinical informed consent, patient-reported outcomes in the post-ICU setting, and Centers of Excellence models as a research assistant in the Social Science Lab in Perioperative Medicine (SSLiPM) in Penn’s Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care. 

What’s my anthropological project? 

Situated at the intersections between anthropology and health services research, my research focuses on how multiple forms of politics, science, and knowledge are operationalized in health systems, and how patients and providers navigate these systems in the US and Latin America. Currently, my project focuses on interactions between territorial struggles and cross-cultural healthcare for indigenous Mapuche patients in Southern Chile to investigate how human health, indigenous sovereignty, and environmental justice are inter-connected. Through ethnographic methods both in and beyond the clinic, my fieldwork seeks to understand how approaches to biomedical and indigenous Mapuche healing are addressing broader community, territorial, and environmental concerns.

What are my medical interests?  

Let’s chat! Email me at Randall.Burson@pennmedicine.upenn.edu and follow me on twitter, @RandyBurson2.

 

Caroline Hodge

7th year MD/PhD (MD-UCSF, PhD-Penn) 

What did I do before the MD-PhD? 

I earned my undergrad degree in religion from Princeton, where my thesis research focused on Christian responses to epidemic diseases, namely leprosy and HIV/AIDS across time. This research led me to a masters program in Medical Anthropology at Oxford, where I got a crash course in the discipline of anthropology and honed both my research interests and my desire to practice clinical medicine, not just study it anthropologically. Just before medical school, I worked in a lab studying the malignant progression of breast cancer and spent my spare time teaching sex education, a formative experience in terms of my current research interests. I'm unlike the rest of my cohort in that I'm split between two institutions: I started medical school at UCSF, and during the first year realized that I really wanted to pursue a PhD as well, which I'm lucky enough to be doing here at Penn. 

What's my anthropological project? 

My dissertation research centers around contraception, exploring how this commonplace technology exceeds its mandate as "birth control" in the American Midwest. Contraception, indeed, refers to a wide range of technologies (e.g., the Pill, the condom, natural family planning) that work on or in a diverse set of users to achieve a disparate set of goals (which may be pregnancy prevention, but also includes regulating heavy or painful periods, treating endometriosis or other gynecologic conditions, use as migraine prophylaxis, and more). Within this great diversity, I'm interested in understanding how people form, articulate, and enact contraceptive desires, how contraceptive technologies move in and through intimate relationships, and what the embodied experience of contraception is like in the Heartland, where matters of reproductive health form the center of a contentious and on-going policy debate. 

What are my medical interests?

My clinical aspirations align with my research interests, and I think that I will either end up in obstetrics and gynecology, or in some branch of pediatrics (adolescent medicine, pediatric gynecology, neonatology) that allows me to continue thinking about reproductive health and working with women and girls as they plan and realize their families. I'd like a career that allows me to combine clinical work and research with teaching, and I'm especially committed to increasing the remit of the social sciences in medical education.

Want to get in touch? 

Email me at chodge@sas.upenn.edu. 

 

Chuan Hao (Alex) Chen

7th year MD/PhD 

What did I do before the MD-PhD? 

I studied architecture for five years at Cornell, drawing building plans and constructing models by day while taking basic science courses at night. I fell in love with medical anthropology in my last year of college and designed a "Hipster Hospital" - inspired by Foucault - for my thesis project. I then pursued a Master of Design Studies in Risk and Resilience at Harvard, conducting fieldwork with Emergency medical Technicians before coming to Penn.  

What's my anthropological project? 

Building upon my Master's project, my dissertation examines how the building of preparedness infrastructures modulates and shapes the idea of safety in the wake of the Ebola crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has shaped the trajectory of fieldwork, which focuses specifically on the design of laboratory architecture and biocontainment technologies for emerging diseases. Combined with observations of pandemic response in the United States, my work examines how race and risk underscore the political and everyday life under emerging disease biocontainment. Whom does biocontainment and who is disavowed under contemporary racial capitalism are key questions that I probe through my dissertation project. 

What are my medical interests? 

Because I love the visual, I am deciding between the fields of radiology and pathology, though I am also thinking about psychiatry because of its historical relationship with cultural anthropology. My dissertation fieldwork with laboratory architects has given me insight into the people, systems and built environment that enable scientific progress, and I hope to incorporate systems thinking, quality improvement, and equity and justice work into my future career. 

Want to get in touch? 

Email me at achenchc@sas.upenn.edu

 

Ben Sieff

8th year MD/PhD

What did I do before the MD-PhD?

As an undergrad, I studied biology at Brown University, where I wrote my senior thesis in anthropology on HIV/AIDS stigma in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa. I spent the following year in South Africa, where I worked as a medical assistant in Mthatha, a small city in the eastern cape, and conducted ethnographic research with evangelical HIV/AIDS activists in Khayalitsha, a peri-urban township on the outskirts of Cape Town. When I returned to the US, I worked as a math and science tutor in New York City for two years.

What's my anthropological project?

My project concerns the medical response to the opioid overdose crisis in the United States. Specifically, it focuses on private sector buprenorphine-based treatment for Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) in rural Pennsylvania. I'm studying this addiction care in a county where buprenorphine remains a controversial medication for many stakeholders. Many residents perceive buprenorphine as a habit-forming substance akin to OxyContin or Percocet, rather than a legitimate longterm medication that reduces the risk of overdose and opioid-related morbidity. Local police have investigated and sanctioned a number of prescribers in the area for "selling prescriptions" for buprenorphine--likening these "rogue prescribers" to "drug dealers in white coats" who exploit vulnerable patients for profit. I am interested in how rural prescribers care for patients on a daily basis, while negotiating this fraught moral and legal terrain. At the same time, how are practices of "care" formally recognized--or found wanting--by law enforcement and medical authorities? And how is legitimate addiction care understood by rural OUD patients?

What are my medical interests?

I am still undecided on this, but I'm interested in primary care, internal medicine, or possibly psychiatry.

Want to get in touch?

Email me at benjaminsieff@gmail.com

  

Dr. Sara Rendell 

Graduated MD/PhD Program 2022 

What did I do before the MD-PhD? 

Prior to my time at Penn, I studied at Saint Louis University where I worked with four other students to create and formalize a neuroscience major and conducted three years of neuro-engineering research on peripheral nerve regeneration that led to my honors thesis on the topic. After graduating, I deferred coming to Penn to study state-subsidized maternal health care in Burkina Faso as the recipient of a Fulbright US Student Program Grant.

Dissertation: My dissertation, titled Closeness through Distance: The Reformulation of Kinship and Racialized Punishment in U.S. Immigration, combined intimate and institutional ethnography with historical documentary research. It focused on how transnational kinship is intimately remade through racialized immigration policies that dictate which kinship relations matter, and how. During the fieldwork on which this dissertation is based, I worked with pro-bono legal aid organizations serving people detained and in deportation proceedings in prisons, jails and courtrooms in the Midwest and South of the US. I observed and documented the direct and collateral harms of hazardous administrative legal outcomes (including eviction, deportation, loss of benefits, and separation of kin) among racialized, low-income families. I am currently transforming the dissertation into a book project, as I continue to explore how kinship is incorporated to justify, execute, or extend harms and how kin create and sustain closeness under migration duress.

Current projects:

I am in residency training in Internal Medicine in the Physician Scientist Pathway at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. I currently collaborate on projects aiming to address structural determinants of health through medical-legal infrastructures. This work spans from health infrastructures that directly influence care for people living with HIV to administrative legal transformations at the state level that affect the everyday lives of people and their kin.

My next project builds from these insights to explore medical-legal partnership as method and as analytic into the ways in which legal infrastructures shape the lives and health of subjects.

Future plans:

After completion of residency and fellowship, I hope to combine research, advocacy and patient care within a faculty position in social medicine.I aim to collaborate across disciplines to address structural determinants of inequities in infectious diseases, including administrative legal harms that threaten social ties and aggravate social isolation.   

Want to get in touch?

Email me at srendell29@gmail.com.

 

Dr. Joshua Franklin

Graduated MD/PhD Program 2021

What did I do before the MD-PhD? 

What's my current anthropological project?

I am in my first year of psychiatry residency at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. I am working on a book-length manuscript based on my dissertation. I am exploring new projects focused on the medicalization of childhood in psychiatry. I am also working on several writing projects on narratives of wellness and burnout, as well as the emergence of the social sciences and humanities as objects of optimism for medicine and medical science.

Future plans:

I hope to pursue training in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and continue my ethnographic work at the intersection of childhood, medicine, and identity.

Want to get in touch? 

Email me at frjosh@pennmedicine.upenn.edu

 

Dr. Lee Young

Graduated MD/PhD Program 2021 

What did I do before this?

I completed undergraduate studies at the University of Louisville where I majored in Anthropology and minored in Russian Language and Cultural Studies. I worked in a molecular anthropology laboratory for several semesters and spent most of my summers studying in Russia. After graduation, I conducted a one-year ethnographic study of drug addiction treatment modalities in Kazan, Russia as a Fulbright Scholar.

Dissertation: My dissertation, entitled Impossible Terrain: An Ethnography of Policing in Atlantic City, NJ, explores racial geographies of Atlantic City and their constitutions through situated analyses of police practice. It mobilizes the analytic of racial capitalism, linking changing forms of urban governance to critical genealogies of policing and liberal governance.

What's my current anthropological project? 

I am in my first year of internal medicine residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. 

Want to get in touch? 

Email me at jlyoun08@gmail.com

 

Dr. Michelle Munyikwa 

Graduated MD/PhD Program 2021

What did I do before the MD-PhD?

I studied at the College of William and Mary, where I self-designed an interdisciplinary major in biochemistry & molecular biology and double-majored in anthropology. There, I developed a curiosity about the potential of translational research and wanted to work at the interface of cancer biology and clinical medicine, leading to my application to medical school. After working at Merck Research Laboratories, however, I learned I was most interested in the social, political, and economic worlds of medicine and scientific research, and I’ve been an anthropologist ever since.

Dissertation: My dissertation, titled Up from the Dirt: Racializing Refuge, Rupture, and Repair in Philadelphia, was an ethnographic and archival exploration of forced migration to Philadelphia. That work examined how humanitarian practices of care for refugees and asylum seekers in the city are shaped by the local contexts of Philadelphia, both past and present. I am currently working on transforming that dissertation into a book project.

What's my current anthropological project? 

Future plans? 

After completion of residency, I hope to pursue a faculty position with a dual appointment in anthropology and clinical practice. My goal is to merge my interests in education, research, and clinical practice towards work that meaningfully advocates for and with marginalized communities.

Want to get in touch? Email me at michelle.munyikwa@gmail.com. 

 

Utpal Sandesara

Graduated MD/PhD Program 2019

Dissertation: My dissertation examined sex-selective abortion in one district of western India's Gujarat state. Although the practice has been illegal in India since 1994 (and the focus of extensive government public health campaigns since the mid-2000s), it continues to drastically skew the child population in many parts of the country - to the extent that Mahesana City, where my research centered, had approximately 760 girls for every 1,000 boys in the last census. Over 18 months of fieldwork from 2012 to 2015, I explored sex selection as a lived experience. In addition to observing hundreds of clinical visits, I conducted in-depth interviews with nearly 50 doctors and black market brokers, over 100 pregnant women and their families, and dozens of government officials charged with curbing sex selection. The resulting dissertation argues for understanding sex selection as a morally complex act of care embedded in broader contexts of familial and medical care. It uses this argument as a starting point for thinking about how we might come up with better representations of and interventions on an obviously problematic phenomenon.

Current Projects:

I am completing an Internal Medicine residency training program at UCLA (more specifically, the Olive View-based Primary Care track). During residency, I am revising my dissertation into a book-length manuscript titled She Is Not Ours: Understanding Sex Selection in Western India. I am also undertaking autoethnographic fieldwork on the experience of residency training with the aim of producing a text that combines personal reflection, social scientific theory, and literary forms of writing to offer future health professionals a unique perspective on the practice of medicine (and initiation into it).

Future Plans: 

After residency, I intend to practice general internal medicine (primary care or hospitalist) with structurally vulnerable populations while continuing to conduct research and teach. More specifically, I hope to use my combined training in medicine and anthropology in order to write for social scientific, clinical, and lay audiences, and to foster in health professions students curiosity and passion for the social side of medical care.

Want to get in touch? 

Email me at utpals@mail.med.upenn.edu

 

Nick Iacobelli

Graduated MD/PhD Program 2018

Dissertation: My dissertation was about the right to healthcare ostensibly granted to prison inmates in the United States under the Eighth Amendment, which protects against cruel and unusual punishment. Through historical analysis, legal scholarship, critical theory, and participant-observation data from 18 months of fieldwork in the medical unit of a men's maximum-security prison in Pennsylvania, I examined what this right looks like in practice and the kinds of care it fosters behind prison walls. I worked to understand how the institutional logics of the prison, the law, and medicine abut interpersonal desires for care, compassion, and recognition.  Even though the Eighth Amendment primarily exists as a mandate not to inflict too much harm, it also creates the conditions for which inmates come to rely on the state for life-saving and life-sustaining services, perpetuating historical forms of racial subjugation through care and containment in the process.

Current Projects: I am completed a residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Washington and am currently a clinical instructor of medicine at the University's Division of General Internal Medicine. I am working to publish the findings of my dissertation as a book-length manuscript titled Wards of the State: Care and Custody in a Pennsylvania Prison with the University of California Press Public Anthropology Series. I'm also working locally in Seattle to develop a research project that investigates the role of medical-legal partnerships and their impact on the lives of those experiencing comorbid homelessness and drug addiction. I'm looking to continue my focus on the intersections of law, medicine, and other forms of institutional power on personal trajectories to see how they shape the struggle to avoid incarceration while seeking access to housing and treatment.

Future Plans: I want to continue research and teaching in anthropology while providing medical care to structurally vulnerable populations as a general internist.

Want to get in touch? Email me at nick.iacobelli@gmail.com