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I am an anthropologist, President’s Professor, and Director of the Center for Global Health at Arizona State University. My two decades of community-based fieldwork are concerned with how inequitable and unjust resource institutions impact people’s well-being, especially under conditions of poverty. I maintain longstanding ties in field sites in Paraguay and Bolivia, and I manage a strategic alliance between la Universidad Católica–Itapúa (Paraguay) and ASU.

My work is also concerned with cross-cultural trends. To this end, I have directed the Global Ethnohydrology Study, a cross-cultural study of water knowledge and management, since 2006. I have an abiding interest in researching water and food insecurity, and my recent book Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting: Stigma and the Undoing of Global Health (co-authored with Dr. Alex Brewis, 2019, Johns Hopkins University Press) brings all these interests together.

Understanding and advancing social science methods is a particular passion of mine. As a scholar, I co-edit the journal Field Methods and co-authored Analyzing Qualitative Data: Systematic Approaches (2016, SAGE). As a teacher, I regularly offer courses and workshops in content analysis, grounded theory, theme identification, systematic coding, and research design. My teaching has been recognized with awards such as Carnegie CASE Arizona Professor of the Year.

I am inspired and motivated by collaborative work. I find working across teams and disciplines helps me answer big questions, and think creatively about how to solve difficult problems at the interface of environment, health, and culture. Working collaboratively with community partners, too, is fundamental to conducting ethical and effective work on social inequalities. As part of collaborative research teams, I have raised over $34 million in funds for research, engagement, and outreach from the National Science Foundation, USDA, and other funders.