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How do people, their families and their providers, manage suffering and illness?  

This has been a guiding question of my research across time and countries. At times, I've expanded the question to explore health inequities within communities, or dived deeply into the nuances of neuroscience and sensation perception to understand the particularities of individual experience. 

My research was recognized by Miami University with the  Distinguished Scholar Award for 2016. 

Illness and health conditions, particularly chronic ones, tend to undermine people's plans, challenge families and communities, and cause suffering.   So it is imperative that we better understand, appreciate, and support the processes that enable people to cope. 

Selected Research Projects

Recovery Housing

Understanding the complexities of substance use recovery and developing solutions to close gaps in outcomes through R-silience

Image by Liv Bruce

Maternal &

Infant Health

Examining the processes that lead to mother death in rural Indonesia, and infant death in the U.S.

Varieties of Illness Experience

Exploring the cultural processes of mental health and its treatment, comparing India with the U.S. 

Global Health and the Environment

Exploring access to clean water and local priorities for interventions in Zambia.

Coping with Chronic Illness and Distress

Diving into illness experiences to understand processes of pain and its sequelae.

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Books

Remembering to Live: Illness at the Intersection of Anxiety and Knowledge in Rural Indonesia.

I'm committed to a 
big table approach to collaborative research.

Anthropologists often do their research in collaboration with the people who happen to be living, working or otherwise engaging in the cultural worlds being studied. But we gather the data, do the analysis, and write-up largely alone. For some research questions and settings, such as my research in Indonesia, this is absolutely the best way of doing research, 

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Most of my recent research uses a "big table" approach working collaboratively with others from different disciplines,  drawing on multiple methods, and partnering with stakeholders for whom the research questions are practical and personal.  This allows me to delve into bigger questions and address bigger problems.   

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Why I do collaborative mixed methods research: 

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