         |
||||||
 |
 |
 I first fell in love with Anthropology as an undergraduate at the University of Auckland, where I did dozens of courses in Pacific Anthropology (I still consider myself a Pacificist, even though I don't do so much work in the Pacific islands anymore). At the age of 22 I set off for the U.S. to do a Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where I was supervised by Jane Underwood, a biological anthropologist and demographer. My first long-term foray into fieldwork was on Butaritari atoll in Kiribati, Micronesia, where I did a study on women’s aging and infertility. Other members of my dissertation committee included psychological anthropologist Jerrold Levy, human biologists William Stini and Herman Bliebtreu, and medical anthropologists Mark Nichter and Marcia Inhorn. I held a post-doc at Brown University in Providence in Anthropological Demography at the Population and Studies Training Center, got involved in Steve McGarvey's field project in Samoa as part of that, and then returned to my native New Zealand to teach at the University of Auckland for a number of years. In 1997 I moved back to the U.S. to take up a position at the University of Georgia, where I was a faculty member in a program focused in Ecological and Environmental Anthropology and began working with issues of schoolchildren's health in Mexico and Georgia. The eight years at UGA, being so institutionally focused on issues of ecology, sustainability, and environment, continues to strongly influence the type of health issues I think about and how I tackle them. I also during that time became a convert to the power of study abroad as an educational tool, and somehow acquired a husband, a daughter, and two dogs. In 2006, ready for new challenges, the family moved westward, and I joined the newly formed School of Human Evolution and Social Change at ASU as a professor of Medical Anthropology. I was drawn to the dynamic transdisciplinary vibe at SHESC, as I've never been one to take much notice of disciplinary boundaries, and am very drawn to the idea propounded at ASU that we need to focus on problems not persuations in how we do our research. Here, I have been centrally involved in putting together new degree cross-cutting programs in the areas of medical anthropology and global health, and having the busiest and best time of my professional life. To ensure I will never, ever be at risk of being bored, I also recently added another baby (a son) and dog to the happy chaos.
|
|
|||
