Zoe Donaldson is a neurogeneticist interested in what it is that makes people different. She seeks to understand how a mixture of genetic and environmental influences results in variations in personality, behavior, and physiology. While pursuing her Ph.D. at Emory University, Zoe focused on the link between genes and behavior. Working with prairie voles, a small monogamous rodent, her research highlights how genetic diversity leads to differences in social behavior. As a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar at Columbia University, she is interested in the reciprocal process of how our experiences are integrated biologically. She plans to pursue parallel human and animal experiments to investigate the epigenetic encoding of social experience in order to understand why some individuals are more profoundly influenced by social interactions than others. Such work has the potential to identify biological correlates of risk and resiliency which may have important implications for interventions in “at risk” populations.
Helena Hansen earned an MD and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale University, during which she completed fieldwork in Havana on Cuban AIDS policy, in urban Connecticut on harm reduction and needle exchange, and in Puerto Rico on faith healing in evangelical Christian addiction ministries founded and run by self-identified ex-addicts. The connecting thread in her work has been a focus on the moral economy of marginalized people, and their strategies for navigating institutions and unequal power relations through different stages of substance use and HIV risk. Her work has been published in both clinical and social science journals ranging from Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, and Medical Anthropology, to the Journal of the American Medical Association and the journal Medical Care. After graduate school, she completed a clinical residency in psychiatry at NYU Medical Center/Bellevue Hospital, during which she also undertook a political-economic and ethnographic study of a new biomedical treatment for addiction; opiate maintenance therapy with buprenorphine. In this study she examines the social and political implications of the effort to establish addiction as a biomedical, rather than moral or social condition, as well as the ways that neurochemical treatments may be reinscribing hierarchies of ethnicity and race. As a Robert Wood Johnson fellow, she will further develop these themes, using cultural-historical comparison with methadone maintenance therapy and other harm reduction movements in the U.S.
Seth Holmes received his PhD in anthropology from UC Berkeley in 2006 and his MD from UCSF. He is currently a resident at the University of Pennsylvania. His dissertation investigates the mechanisms by which the social position of Mexican migrant workers in the U.S. affect their health, and the ways in which these health inequalities become normalized in American society, through cultural symbols and the deployment of symbolic power. In his next research project, he wants to investigate why the American urban poor die of untreated AIDS in a context of ample resources and effective treatment.
