Professor Lauren Carruth, MS, PhD

Professor Lauren Curruth is a medical anthropologist specializing in humanitarian assistance, global health, food security, nutrition science, refugees, transnational migration, and displacement in the Horn of Africa. Most of her research has been in Ethiopia and Djibouti. Her ongoing ethnographic work documents the lasting effects of repeated humanitarian emergencies and episodic humanitarian relief and global health interventions in the Somali Region of Ethiopia. Currently, she teaches graduate and undergraduate interdisciplinary courses in global health and nutrition at American University. She has a PhD in sociocultural and medical anthropology from the University of Arizona, an MS in nutrition science and humanitarian policy from Tufts University, and a graduate certificate in humanitarian studies and practice from Harvard University.

Since 2005, she has worked closely with the UNICEF and the regional government in Ethiopia to improve health and humanitarian responses. She has been published in the journals The Lancet, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Disasters, Social Science & Medicine, and Global Public Health, as well as in media outlets including The Conversation, Scientific American, and The Washington Post. In all of her research projects and publications, she attempts to bring the voices and concerns of underserved and marginalized populations to bear on the practice of clinical biomedicine, the science of epidemiology, and health and humanitarian policymaking.