I am a faculty member of the Anthropology program within the School of Language, Culture & Society. I am also an adjunct faculty member in Global Health, Public Policy, and Humanitarian Engineering at Oregon State. Prior to joining OSU, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University’s Population Studies & Training Center, an interdisciplinary center specializing in the study of demography, health and development.

To learn more about my current work in the U.S., check out this profile.

To learn more about my earlier work in Ethiopia, read this review of my recent book, The Lives of Community Health Workers.

Recent projects

2015-present:

The CHW Center for Research and Evaluation

2012-2016:

The Women’s Development Army in rural Ethiopia: discourses and experiences of health worker status, motivation, and well-being.

2010-2019:

Water insecurity and psychological distress among women in Amhara, Ethiopia.

2011-2012:

Examining the effects of polio eradication efforts on routine immunization and primary health care in Ethiopia. 

2006-2009:

Food Insecurity, well-being and motivations among volunteer HIV/AIDS caregivers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Research Interests: 

Health Equity, Global Health, Community Health Workers, Health Systems, Food Insecurity, Water Insecurity, Mental Health, Maternal and Child Health, Religion, Morality, and Ritual

Geographical Areas: 

United States, Ethiopia

As an applied anthropologist, I participate in a broad coalition of allies focused on achieving health equity.

As a biocultural medical anthropologist, I'm primarily interested in the determinants and outcomes of the massive lack of effective health workers in contexts of poverty and marginalization.

My colleagues and I are particularly passionate about community health workers or CHWs: people who provide health care within their own marginalized communities, and organize those communities to work towards health equity. CHWs, because of their intimate relationships with community members, are uniquely capable of improving health and reducing suffering in vulnerable populations. But around the world, many community health workers face insecure employment and are paid at levels that keep them in poverty. I focus on answering a range of questions through a mix of ethnography, survey, and other methodologies:

• How do CHWs bring about impacts on population health
  • at the individual level (helping people get well)?
  • at the structural level (organizing communities to change and resist harmful policies and practices)?
• Why are community health workers suffering from forms of burnout and distress?
• How do CHWs and allies organize, build coalitions, and conduct research and evaluation?
• How do big institutions -- governments, NGOs, think tanks, donors, and foundations -- influence the quantity and quality of available community health worker jobs?

My collaborators and I use ethnographic methods to forefront the voices of CHWs as they narrate their emotional and social labor, including their work to convince employers and other health system actors to change policies that stifle their power and effectiveness.  We aim to document the ways in which CHWs build relationships with stigmatized people, reconcile family and community disputes, confront death, prevent violence, challenge forms of discrimination, and influence policy makers. This kind of care work is crucial to peoples' wellbeing and massively undervalued within modern health systems.

We also use a mix of methods to illuminate the forms of distress and deprivation that CHWs experience. This aspect of our work has shown that large numbers of CHWs face chronically insecure access to basic resources including land, food, and water, which generate forms of psychological suffering that relatively well paid and empowered health workers do not have to face.

Another area of collaborative research in which I’m involved targets the daily lack of access to water experienced by people around the world. My colleagues and I are interested in understanding the political, cultural and ecological determinants of water insecurity, and demonstrating the multiple negative impacts of water insecurity on individual and social wellbeing. My former doctoral student Dr. Yihenew Tesfaye and I recently teamed up with a diverse array of colleagues to develop and apply measures of household water insecurity across the globe.