eraikhel@uchicago.edu

Eugene Raikhel is a cultural and medical anthropologist with interests encompassing the anthropology of science, biomedicine and psychiatry; addiction and its treatment; suggestion and healing; and post-socialist transformations in Eurasia. He is particularly concerned with the circulation of new forms of knowledge and clinical intervention produced by biomedicine, neuroscience and psychiatry. His work follows therapeutic technologies as they move both from “bench to bedside” and from one cultural or institutional setting to another, examining how they intersect with the lives of practitioners and patients.

Eugene Raikhel’s 2024–25 Courses

• HLTH 17000 Introduction to Health and Society (Autumn)

 

Kavi Bhalla, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences of the Biological Sciences Division at the University of Chicago, and Affiliated Faculty at the Harris School of Public Policy. His research aims to develop transport systems that are safe, sustainable and equitable, with a central focus on road safety in low- and middle-income countries. His recent work has focused on the development of analytical tools for improving estimates of the incidence of injuries in information-poor settings using available data sources. Kavi co-led the injury expert group of the 2010 Global Burden of Disease Project. He is formally trained as a mechanical engineer and his PhD (Cornell, 2001) thesis research focused on the mechanics of material failure, which he later applied to the study of injury biomechanics and vehicle crashworthiness. He is broadly interested in the design of products, environments, and systems that are safe and have positive health impacts.

Michele Friedner is  a medical anthropologist researching deaf and disabled peoples’ social, moral, religious, and economic practices, with a primary focus on deafness in India. Disability as category and experience have become increasingly salient in the international policy arena and in everyday life. At the same time, new technologies are emerging that provide possibilities for rendering disability malleable and even making people “normal.” In analyzing these phenomena, she asks what the category of disability does and what kinds of disability futures are desired and made possible. One of her enduring concerns is the relationship between stigma and value, and in particular the ways that disability enables the creation of different forms of value under late liberalism. She also analyzes the emergence of new sensory infrastructures that crystallize around technologies such as cochlear implants and the ways that these technologies simultaneously normalize and erase disability. Within the broader category of disability, much of her work focuses on deafness as a productive site for interrogating questions of language, personhood, and sociality. Through individual and collaborative research and writing endeavors, she has worked to place disability and deafness in anthropological and other scholarly conversations about the state, the senses, and urban planning and development, as examples.

David O. Meltzer, PhD’92, MD’93, is Chief of the Section of Hospital Medicine, Director of the Center for Health and the Social Sciences, and Chair of the Committee on Clinical and Translational Science at the University of Chicago, where he is Professor in the Department of Medicine, and affiliated faculty at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the Department of Economics. Meltzer’s research explores problems in health economics and public policy with a focus on the theoretical foundations of medical cost-effectiveness analysis and the cost and quality of hospital care. Meltzer has performed randomized trials comparing the use of doctors who specialize in inpatient care (“hospitalists”). He is currently leading a Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Innovation Challenge award to study the effects of improved continuity in the doctor patient relationship between the inpatient and outpatient setting on the costs and outcomes of care for frequently hospitalized Medicare patients. He led the formation of the Chicago Learning Effectiveness Advancement Research Network (Chicago LEARN) that helped pioneer collaboration of Chicago-Area academic medical centers in hospital-based comparative effectiveness research and the recent support of the Chicago Area Patient Centered Outcomes Research Network (CAPriCORN) by the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).

Michael Rossi is an historian of medicine and science in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. His work focuses on the historical and cultural metaphysics of the body: how different people at different times understood questions of beauty, truth, falsehood, pain, pleasure, goodness, and reality vis-à-vis their corporeal selves and those of others.

His first book manuscript traces the origins of color science—the physiology, psychology, and physics of color—in the late-nineteenth-century United States to a series of questions about what modern America ought to be: about the scope of medical, scientific, and political authority over the sensing body; about the nature of aesthetic, physiological, and cultural development between individual and civilization; about the relationship between aesthetic harmony, physiological balance, and social order.

His second project looks at how linguists, anatomists, and speech pathologists moved, over the course of the twentieth century, from viewing language as a function of sound-producing organs (tongue, lips, palate, larynx, etc.) to searching for a notional “language organ” within the brains of all human beings. Such interpretative shifts in understanding human anatomy are neither an ancient phenomenon nor one limited to extreme medical specialization, but rather are ongoing issues, providing a window on the social, political, and philosophical understanding of modern bodies, medicine, and science.

Jenny Trinitapoli’s training is in two areas: social demography & the sociology of religion. Bridging these two fields, her work features the demographer’s characteristic concern with data and denominators and an insistence on connecting demographic processes to questions of meaning. She asks a lot of questions about data quality, and  may or may not be addicted to data collection.

Trinitapoli has written extensively on the role of religion in the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa, but religion permeates her research, even when it isn’t present as a variable. Since 2008 she has been the principal investigator of Tsogolo la Thanzi (TLT)—an ongoing longitudinal study of young adults in Malawi. Demographers use terms like “relationship instability” and “fertility trajectories,” but very plainly: TLT asks how young adults negotiate relationships, sex, and childbearing with a severe AIDS epidemic swirling around them. The TLT research centre, located in Balaka (Southern Malawi), is staffed by over two dozen talented locals and supported by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.