Core Group Member

Mark Nichter, Ph.D., M.P.H.
Professor, Department of Anthropology
University of Arizona at Tucson
Emil Haury Building, Room 221
P.O. Box 210030
South Campus drive and Park Avenue
Tucson, AR 85721-0030
Phone: 520-621-2665
Fax: 520-621-2088 / 520-795-7409
Email:  mnichter@u.arizona.edu

Mark A. Nichter PhD, MPH, is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, holding joint appointments in the Departments of Family Medicine and Public Health. One of the most productive scholars of medical anthropology in the world, he has pioneered the use of ethnographic methods in the fields of medicine, ethnomedicine, and public health. Professor Nichter has conducted extensive research in developing countries as well as in the USA and has written, been co-author or editor of seven books and nearly 100 articles and book chapters related to public health issues. His research and writing has shaped the field of medical anthropology and addressed such issues as child survival, infectious and vector born disease, women’s health,  pharmaceutical use and drug resistance, tobacco use and nicotine dependency, and emerging diseases. At the University of Arizona, he has built a doctoral program in medical anthropology, and has chaired the work of over 30 PhD students. He has also helped train health social scientists and medical and public health researchers in India, Sri Lanka, Thailand and the Philippines as well playing a pivotal role in developing an international clinical epidemiology network that operates in over 41 different countries. Professor Nichter has received some of the most prestigious awards in his discipline, including the Radcliffe-Brown Award from the Royal Anthropological Society and the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association. The Society for Medical Anthropology awarded him the Virchow Award and most recently it’s Career Mentorship Award. Professor Nichter served as the president for the Society of Medical Anthropology.

Professor Nichter’s  research focuses on the biocultural  and social relational dimensions of health and health related behavior. He studies health as an embodied state subject to societal and global arrangements of power and resource distribution. His research combines an investigation of the sociocultural, economic, and political ecological contexts of risk, disease transmission and distribution, health care seeking, and harm reduction.  Professor Nichter has spent much of his career modeling ways in which interdisciplinary as well as community based participatory research can contribute to problem solving and critical inquiry. He has pioneered dozens of original lines of inquiry, and contributed to innovations in both anthropology theory and methodology. At present he is working on multidisciplinary teams conducting tobacco related research in Arizona, India, and Indonesia; complementary and alternative medicine research in the USA; and research on emerging diseases (such as TB and avian flu) in South and Southeast Asia. Through his work on national and international health committees, Professor Nichter has helped inform health policy on a national and global scale. In the US he has served on two Institute of Medicine Committees; one focusing on Tobacco Use Among Youth in the USA, and the other American’s Use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine.