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Fellowships

NIMH Program

Fogarty Training Program in International Mental Health

Freeman Program

University of Melbourne/Harvard Medical School International Mental Health LeadershipProgram


Additional Programs


Research in Indonesia

International Children's Mental Health Program


Research in China


World Mental Health Casebook

Faculty

 

 

 

NIMH Fellows
Former

 

Lawrence Park, NIMH Fellow 2004-2006

Sarah Horton,
NIMH Fellow 2003-2005

Sarah Pinto,
NIMH Fellow 2003-2005

Everett Zhang,
NIMH Fellow 2003-2005

Christopher Dole,
NIMH Fellow 2002 - 2004

Erica James,
NIMH Fellow 2002 - 2004

Dr.. Tomomi Inomata, NIMH Fellow 2001 - 2003

Dr. Doris F. Chang is a clinical psychologist who received her degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Chang's clinical and research interests include ethnic minority mental health, somatization, culture and psychiatric diagnosis, and the development of socially and culturally responsive health services. As an NIMH postdoctoral fellow (2000-2002) in the Department of Social Medicine, Dr. Chang has been collaborating with a local agency to develop a model for addressing family violence within Asian immigrant communities. Using a variety of field methods, this research highlights the importance of understanding clients' experience of violence in the context of their personal and sociopolitical history, and exploring the ways in which immigrant status itself may contribute to risk for family violence. In addition, this research demonstrates that successful service delivery to Asian immigrant communities depends on collaboration with community leaders to identify local needs and priorities, and promote collective responsibility for ending family violence.

Andrew Lakoff received his Ph.D. in Anthropology (2000) from UC Berkeley, and is currently an NIMH Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard. His areas of interest include the anthropology of biomedicine, globalization processes, comparative modernities, governmentality, and the history of the human sciences. His forthcoming book, Pharmaceutical Reason: Subject and Psychotrope in Buenos Aires describes ethical and epistemological debates in contemporary psychiatric practice both within a distinctive epistemic community and across transnational networks. His current research focuses on anti-depressant drug development, specifically looking at the placebo effect in clinical trials, intellectual property and secrecy, and the cultures of multinational pharmaceutical firms. He will begin an appointment as Assistant Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at UC San Diego in the Spring 2002.

João Biehl is assistant professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. He earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley (1999), and his Ph.D. in the Study of Religion from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley (1996). His anthropological work is concerned with the global flows of scientific knowledge and medical technology, and with their integration into new market strategies, forms of governance and subjectivity particularly in the context of the AIDS epidemic in Latin America. As a NIMH post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School (1999-2000), he began new research on death and dying and the work of the palliative care team at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He is currently working on two book projects: "Subjectivity Transformed" (with Byron Good and Arthur Kleinman), and "Vita: Life in a Dead Language" (with photographer Torben Eskerod).

Joyce Chung
, M.D., is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Department of Psychiatry, Georgetown University Medical School, in Washington, DC. She received her M.D. from Northwestern University Medical School in 1984 and completed her internship at Cambridge Hospital and her psychiatry residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. She was an NIMH postdoctoral Fellow in Medical Anthropology from 1988-90.
Dr. Chung has been a co-investigator of a NIMH funded mental health services project (WECare project) on the effectiveness of treatment for Major Depressive Disorder in low-income women since 1997. She has also been the PI of a pilot research project funded by NIMH and the Bayer Institute for Health Care Communication on "Explanatory Models and Effective Treatment of Depression." In this project she has been analyzing videotapes of the treatment carried out in the WECare project in order to understand more about processes of care. She was at the University of Minnesota Medical School and has been at Georgetown for the past nine years. She recently helped formulate and was the chief writer of the American Psychiatric Association Practice Guidelines for the Treatment of Patients with HIV/AIDS.


Robert Desjarlais
received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1990. After participating in the NIHM post-doctoral fellowship program at Harvard from 1990-1992, he served as the project coordinator for the collaborative study, World Mental Health: Priorities and Problems in Low-Income Countries, published in 1995 by Oxford University Press. Since 1994 he has taught anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. His scholarship is geared primarily to the study, through comprehensive anthropological methods, of selfhood, emotions, bodiliness, memory, personal hardship, and illness and healing in particular social worlds in order to develop integrative ways of thinking about the makings of human subjectivities. In addition to publishing over 20 scholarly papers, he has authored two books published by the University of Pennsylvania Press: Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas, and Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood among the Homeless. His current research project, supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Howard Foundation, entails a study of the intersecting cultural, discursive, and sensorial features of life and death among the Yolmo people of north central Nepal.

Susan M. DiGiacomo
became a medical anthropologist first by accident, and later by design. Toward the end of her doctoral research in Barcelona on discourses of Catalan nationhood, she was diagnosed with cancer and went almost directly from the field to a major US teaching and research hospital for testing, surgery and treatment; she went to the hospital as an anthropologist, armed with a notebook and the same kinds of theoretical concerns about the nature of power that had brought her to Barcelona. Following her recovery, she spent two years (1988-1990) as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Social Medicine. In 1992 and 1993 she was a visiting professor and researcher in the epidemiology department of the Institut Municipal d'Investigació Mèdica in Barcelona, where she studied both epidemiological and medical discourses of cancer diagnosis and treatment. she also teaches periodically in a master's degree program in medical anthropology at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona).
A request to review a manuscript submitted by a Catalan anthropologist to Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry during her NIMH fellowship opened up a new dimension of her professional life: translation. Since that first article, she has published a number of other translations, the most recent of which is a book, What's Behind the Symptom? On Psychiatric Observation and Anthropological Understanding, by Àngel Martínez-Hernáez (Harwood/Gordon and Breach, 2000). It appears as a volume in a medical anthropology book series - Theory and Practice in Medical Anthropology and International Health - she has edited since 1995.


Alasdair Donald t
rained as a physician in Australia before completing a PhD in anthropology with a specific interest in psychological anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. After graduation, he completed training as a psychiatrist at Cambridge Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and also commenced training in clinical psychoanalysis at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. He then had the privilege of being an NIMH Fellow at the Department of Social Medicine during which two years he completed ethnographic study of the impact of managed care upon the experience and practice of clinical psychiatry and developed an interest in the sociology of psychiatric knowledge. Currently he is in private practice and consults to the Department of Psychiatry at San Francisco General Hospital in San Francisco.

Madelyn Hsiao-Rei Hicks
is of mixed Chinese and White descent, born and raised in a Midwestern farming community. A B.A. in Biology at the University of Louisville was followed by a B.A. in Zoology at Oxford University as a Humphrey Scholar. She completed her M.D. at the University of Louisville School of Medicine in 1989. This was followed by medical internship and psychiatry residency at Brown University where she was introduced to the field of cultural psychiatry. From 1993 to 1995 she was a research fellow in the Department of Social Medicine's N.I.M.H. Supported Research Training Program in Clinically Relevant Medical and Psychiatric Anthropology. Participation in Dr. Sue Levkoff's Exploratory Center on Health Promotion for Ethnic Minority Elders with Dementia and their Caregivers provided valuable experience on combining ethnography and quantitative research methods. While a fellow she developed a proposal to study interactions between partner violence and major depression in Chinese American women. This Boston-based study was done through a Young Investigator's Grant from NARSAD while an instructor in the department from 1995 to 1997, with Dr. Arthur Kleinman as mentor, and forms the basis of her conference presentation..
Dr. Hicks is currently affiliated with the department while based in London as a consultant psychiatrist with the Maudsley Hospital and honorary research worker with the Institute of Psychiatry. In addition to recent work on helpseeking for depression and suicidality, and perceived causes of suicide attempts in London South Asian women, she continues to analyze data from the NARSAD study. The main finding of this study is strong evidence of a causative role for partner violence in the epidemiology of major depression in Chinese American women living in the community, with additional factors being non-partner trauma history, education, English fluency and cultural style of the current partner relationship.


Sandra Teresa Hyde received her first Master's degree in Public Health Education in 1988 at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. For the next three years, Dr. Hyde worked in the Hawaiian islands as a public health planner in women's reproductive health, and as a consultant in adolescent health, and mental health services, before embarking on her doctoral studies. Dr. Hyde received her Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology from UC Berkeley in December 1999, and her dissertation, "Sex, Drugs and Karaoke: Making AIDS in Southwest China," was on the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in southwest China. Dr. Hyde is currently an NIMH Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Medicine at Harvard University. She will be joining the faculty in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University in Canada in spring 2002. While at Harvard, she is coordinating the Medical Anthropology seminar, and conducting research on the medicalization of gender and the culture of biology surrounding the surgical sex reassignment of intersex infants. Dr. Hyde has also worked as a consultant for several non-governmental organizations in China on AIDS prevention and designing social science research protocols for HIV/AIDS. Her two most recent publications are a chapter in Nancy Chen's China Urban (2001) titled, "Sex Tourism Practices on the Periphery: Eroticizing Ethnicity and Pathologizing Sex on the Lancang," and, an article in East Asia (2000), titled, "Selling Sex and Sidestepping the State: Prostitutes, Condoms, and HIV/AIDS Prevention in Southwest China."

Amaro J. Laria
, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in the Primary Care Behavioral Health Program at The Cambridge Hospital, where he coordinates cross-cultural behavioral medicine services, primarily with Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking patients. He is also an Instructor in Psychology at the Psychiatry Department, Harvard Medical School, where he's involved in teaching, supervising and conducting clinical research. His current research involvement is in the area of medically unexplained physical symptoms ("somatization") among Latino/Hispanic immigrant patients in a primary care setting. He was a NIMH Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School during 1998-2000. His most recent publications include: "The Professional Fragmentation of Experience in the Study of Dissociation, Somatization, and Culture" (Laria, A. & Lewis-Fernandez, R., Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, in press), and "Political Chaos, Migration, & Internal Fragmentation: A Case of Atypical (Reactive) Psychosis in an Eritrean Refugee" (Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry, in press). Previous research activities include a study of "Dissociative Experiences among Cuban Spiritist Mediums & Mental Health Patients." Dr. Laria is also Associate Professor in the Clinical Psychology Programs at Clark University, where he teaches "Culture & Mental Health," and at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he teaches "Health Psychology." He's also the Director of the "Mental Health Initiative" at Central American Relief, a collaborative project to promote the provision of mental health services in rural areas in Nicaragua, El Salvador & Honduras.

Roberto Lewis-Fernández
is Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University and Lecturer on Social Medicine at Harvard University. He received his B.A. from Harvard College in 1979, a Master's Degree in comparative religion from Harvard Divinity School in 1982, and his M.D. from Yale Medical School in 1986. He obtained his psychiatric training at The Cambridge Hospital (1986-90) and completed a Dupont-Warren psychiatric research fellowship (1990-91) and an NIMH-sponsored fellowship in clinically applied medical anthropology (1991-93) at Harvard Medical School. From 1993 to 1995, Dr. Lewis-Fernández worked for the Puerto Rico Health Department implementing an innovative mental health consultation-liaison program for rural primary care clinics.
His research focuses on the socio-cultural determinants of illness experience, symptomatology, help-seeking behavior, and treatment outcome among U.S. Latinos, particularly Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, diagnosed with anxiety, depressive, and dissociative disorders. In collaboration with his colleague, Dr. Peter Guarnaccia, Dr. Lewis-Fernández has helped clarify the relationship between psychiatric diagnoses and ataque de nervios, a Latin American popular syndrome. He is also working on defining the socio-cultural aspects contributing to the elevated treatment dropout rate found among Latino psychiatric outpatients. Dr. Lewis-Fernández was on the DSM-IV Cross-Cultural Committee and is currently a member of the Cultural Psychiatry Committee of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry. He also serves as Editor of the Cases Section of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, which publishes clinical cases illustrating the impact of culture on the symptoms, course, and outcome of psychiatric disorders and patients' help-seeking choices.


Cheryl Mattingly
is Professor of Anthropology with a joint appointment in the Department of Occupational Science and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. (Anthropology and Urban Studies) in 1989 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was an NIMH research fellow in Clinically Relevant Anthropology at the Department of Social Medicine, Harvard University, from 1990 - 1992. Her major areas of research and publication have been directed to developing a narrative framework for the study of rehabilitation practices in the United States. Her publications include Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing (2000, University of California Press), co-edited with Linda Garro; Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience (1998, University of Cambridge Press); Clinical Reasoning in a Therapeutic Practice (1994, F.A. Davis Press), co-authored with Maureen Fleming. Narrative and Society (University of Aarhus Press), co-edited with Uffe Jensen, is forthcoming, December 2001. She received the 2000 Victor Turner Prize (Society for Humanistic Anthropology, American Anthropology Association) for Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots and the 1999 Polgar Prize (Society for Medical Anthropology, American Anthropological Association) for the essay "In Search of the Good: Narrative Reasoning in Clinical Practice," published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly. Over the past ten years, she has received a series of large federal grants from several agencies (National Institutes of Health, Maternal and Child Health, Department of Education) to conduct ethnographic research among African American families who have children with chronic illnesses and disabilities. She is currently working on a book that focuses upon this research among African-Americans in Chicago and Los Angeles and draws upon narrative to rethink theories of culture. The working title is Narrative Acts in a Cultural Borderland: Race, Healing and Literary Anthropology.

Don Seeman is Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He completed his PhD in anthropology at Harvard in 1997 and was an NIMH postdoctoral fellow in 1997-1998. Don's current research interests include "useless suffering," phenomenology of religious violence and healing, and infectious disease among Ethiopian immigrants. It sounds eclectic, but if you lived in Israel you'd understand that it's not. He was married last August, and lives happily in Jerusalem with his wife Debra.

Karen-Sue Taussig
is currently a lecturer in Social Studies and the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. She received the Ph.D. in social-cultural anthropology from the Johns Hopkins University in 1997. From 1997-1999 she was an NIMH post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. During the 2000-2001 academic year she organized, with Allan Brandt and Dan Callahan, a year-long university-wide faculty seminar on genetics and ethics in the Division of Medical Ethics, Harvard Medical School. Dr. Taussig's work has focused on the emergence, circulation, and meaning of new genetic knowledge in the United States and Europe. Her current project takes as its premise that we in the United States are in the midst of a profound world-view shift involving genetic causality and human affliction. Taussig, arguing that such a shift cannot just happen but must be attached to institutional, political, and economic changes, is examining the diverse range of sites in which a wide array of individuals are engaged in teaching, learning, and experiencing genetics.
Dr. Taussig's publications include "Calvinism and Chromosomes: Religion, the Geographical Imaginary, and Medical Genetics in the Netherlands" in Science as Culture (1997), "AIDS, Knowledge, and Discrimination in the Inner City: An Anthropological Analysis of Experiences of Injection Drug Users" (with E. Martin, L. Oaks, and A. van der Straten), in Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions into Techno-Humanism, G. Downy, J. Dumit eds. (1997), and the forthcoming book, Just Be Ordinary: Normalizing the Future through Genetic Research and Practice (University of California Press).

Norma C. Ware
is a medical anthropologist and Associate Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She divides her time principally between independent research activities and mentoring junior mental health services researchers interested in medical anthropology and qualitative methods. Dr. Ware's research on the social course of chronic illness began in 1988, when, as an NIMH postdoctoral fellow, she conducted an interview study of social influences on illness experience in chronic fatigue syndrome under the tutelage of Arthur Kleinman. This work led to a longitudinal study entitled "Social Course of CFS," supported by the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and more recently to a study of the "Social Course of Adherence to HAART in Active Illegal Drug Users with HIV/AIDS," funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Dr. Ware's independent research on mental health services began with an NIMH-supported project to develop a measure of continuity of care using data from an ethnographic study. Additional funding provided an opportunity to examine the cultural relevance of the measure for ethnic minorities living in the continental United States. The measure has been translated and adapted for exclusively Spanish speaking populations. It is about to be made available for public use.
These two lines of research are presently converging in a project designed to trace the social course of recovery from schizophrenia. Since 1999, Dr. Ware has been a member of the NIMH Services Research Review Committee. She is involved in active collaborations with researchers at the Center for Mental Health Services Research at Rutgers University, the Center for Mental Health Services Research at the University of Maryland, the Latino Research Program Project at the University of Puerto Rico, the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University, and the Center for the Study of Issues in Public Mental Health at the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research.




 


 

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