Professor Emily Mendenhall, PhD, MPH

Emily Mendenhall is a medical anthropologist and Professor in the Science, Technology, and International Affairs (STIA) Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Previously, she was a visiting Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, National Institutes of Health Fogarty Scholar at the Public Health Foundation of India, and Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she still holds an Honorary Appointment. She received a PhD in anthropology from Northwestern University and MPH in global public health from Emory University. She lives in the DC area with her husband (Adam Koon), young daughters, and pup.

Dr. Mendenhall has published widely in anthropology, medicine, and public health. In 2017, she led a Series of articles on Syndemics in The Lancet to challenge how we understand concurrent epidemics to cluster, interact, and result from politics, climate, and society. This work was influenced by more than a decade of research about how people perceive, experience, and embody trauma and diabetes through personal stories. This culminated in the book Rethinking Diabetes: Entanglements with Trauma, Poverty, and HIV (2019). She is also the author of Syndemic Suffering: Social Distress, Depression, and Diabetes among Mexican Immigrant Women (2012) and co-editor of Global Mental Health: Anthropological Perspectives (2015). In 2017, Dr. Mendenhall was awarded the George Foster Award for Practicing Medical Anthropology by the Society for Medical Anthropology.

Dr. Mendenhall’s newest book is Unmasked: COVID, Community, and the Case of Okoboji (order here). The book investigates how people responded to COVID-19 in her hometown in northwest Iowa.Unmasked explores political priorities, cultural squabbles, and business interests that undermined public health efforts when no mandates were in place. Some of this research on how people perceived and experienced coronavirus in rural Iowa has been published in Vox as well as Social Science and Medicine and Global Public Health. She also has ongoing research on syndemics in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she has worked for nearly a decade. She is the Principle Investigator of the National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center study “Soweto Syndemics” at the University of the Witwatersrand.

In 2021, Dr. Mendenhall joined the helm of launching Social Science and Medicine—Mental Health (SSMMH), with Dr. Alexander Tsai and Dr. Brandon Kohrt, as co-Editors-in-Chief.

Sub-specialties: how poverty makes you sick, diabetes, depression, mental illness, women's health, social and gender inequalities in health, anthropology, social and political determinants of health