Faculty News 2022

Submitted by Haley Lee on

FACULTY

Postdoctoral Anthropology Associate Monica Keith accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Anthropology at Vanderbilt University.

Melanie Martin and Postdoctoral Scholar Monica Keith were selected as one of seven winning teams for the Decoding Maternal Morbidity Challenge from NIH's National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Their team submission, led by Monica, used data from NICHD's Nulliparous Pregnancy Outcomes Study, theories of allostatic load, and structural equation modeling to clarify causal pathways between cumulative social stressors, clinical health measures, and hypertensive disorders of pregnancy. Their data solution was awarded prizes for both innovation and addressing health disparities. They were the only winning team composed entirely of social scientists. They will use the $60k prize in research funds to continue developing the model to predict variation in gestational age and disparities in pre-term birth risk. 

 Melanie Martin and colleagues Horacio de la Iglesia (Department of Biology) and Zack Almquist (Department of Sociology) were awarded a UW Population Health Initiative Tier 1 Pilot Research Grant for their project “Sleep Health in People Experiencing Homelessness”, with matching funds received from the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology and the Department of Biology. The pilot project, to be carried out in Seattle during Summer 2022, will establish methods for monitoring sleep and associated health outcomes in people experiencing homelessness in different sleeping environments, with the overarching goal of using sleep as a metric for evaluating the efficacy of interventions to address the Seattle area homelessness crisis and improve wellbeing of affected individuals. 

 Holly Barker obtained a Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies Native Knowledge Lecturer grant. This award will provide funding for Dr. Lynette Finau, a scholar and community leader who has worked closely with UW and the Burke Museum for many years, to teach a course entitled "Oceanic Epistemologies & Dance" (Anth 369) in the Fall. 

Ben Fitzhugh has a new edited volume coming out in May, "Maritime Prehistory of Northeast Asia" edited by Jim Cassidy, Irina Ponkratova and Ben Fitzhugh and published y Springer Nature.

Radhika Govindrajan received an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Diana Forsythe Prize awarded by the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology & Computing, Society for the Anthropology of Work and the General Anthropology Division. In recognition of her book, the committee wrote: Animal Intimacies engages with a lively species multiple: rambunctious goats, lonely cows, wild pigs, displaced monkeys, and sexually promiscuous bears. Beautifully written accounts of human-animal relations come together in a vivid story about how people who live among the Himalayan mountains in India are situated within agricultural and ecological assemblages.”

Jenna Grant was awarded Tenure and Promotion to Associate Professor at the University of Washington. She was selected for a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award for 2022-2023. The award will support graduate teaching at Royal University of Phnom Penh and research on experimental global health sciences in Cambodia and the Mekong Subregion.

Raphaëlle Rabanes received a Simpson Center Research Fellowship for 2022-23 to support her work on her book Postcolonial Repair: Memory, Embodiment, and Therapeutics in the French Caribbean.

James Pfeiffer was given the George Foster Practicing Medical Anthropology Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology for his lifetime contributions to applying theory and methods particularly in diverse contexts, impacts on policy, and accessibility/relevance of work to multidisciplinary audiences.

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