Elisa J. Sobo, Diana Schow and Stephanie McClure

Elisa (EJ) Sobo, Professor and Chair of Anthropology, is a sociocultural anthropologist. Past President of the Society for Medical Anthropology and a longstanding member of the editorial boards of Anthropology and Medicine, Medical Anthropology, and Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Dr. Sobo has published thirteen books (e.g., Culture and Meaning in Health Services Research) and numerous peer-reviewed articles. Her work has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, and in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other news outlets; and she has written commentaries for HuffPost, Sapiens, San Diego’s Union Tribune, and other public-facing media. Dr. Sobo’s areas of expertise include childhood and child health, biomedical and other medical/health cultures, organizational issues in healthcare, patient-provider communication, disparities and cultural competence in health care, health-related stigma and identity, risk perception, and qualitative methods (including both ethnographic and rapid assessment methods). Recent projects concern: parents’ use of cannabis-based therapies for children with intractable epilepsy seizures; how ethnomedical understandings about healthy child development affect educational strategies and standards; and pediatric vaccination. Dr. Sobo is currently part of CommuniVax, a national coalition aiming to help ensure an equitable vaccine rollout. For more than 20 years Dr. Schow has engaged in a combination of direct services, administration, teaching/training and qualitative, community-based research for social service and public health programs. Her areas of focus include domestic violence prevention, child abuse prevention, women’s health, migrant health and physical activity promotion. Her work has regularly involved building and maintaining partnerships between social services, public health and clinical practitioners. This approach has resulted in implementation of clinic-based, multi-disciplinary learning experiences for Spanish-speaking health promoters and domestic violence/sexual assault advocates. These connections resulted in improving access to healthcare for community members. She was born and raised in the Rocky Mountain west and has worked in Idaho, Montana, Peru and several European countries. Stephanie McClure's overarching area of interest is culture, the body, and health. Said in another way, my primary research interest (currently) is the body as the subject andobject of culture, and the bearing that subject/object duality has on how health is understood, experienced, assessed, etc. My current pursuits with respect to that overarching interest fall into three categories: physicality and identity, intersectionality, and physical activity and wellbeing. My population focus is African American women and girls.