As a medical and psychological anthropologist, my work aims to contribute to flows of knowledge and practice between anthropology and medicine. Over the course of my career, I have sought to attend closely to the lived experiences of those marginalized by mental illness, stigma, social exclusion, and poverty in the U.S. My scholarship is grounded in experience-based and meaning-centered approaches in medical and psychological anthropology, which aim to unite engagement with lived experiences of distress with attention to how structural forces produce and exacerbate suffering. Through ethnographic methods, I engage closely with individuals, families, and communities to examine lived experiences of illness and how people navigate through complex landscapes of care. In this work, I center issues of health equity by critically examining missed opportunities in clinical care and the high-stakes consequences that occur when systems of care fail those they are intended to help.

Since 2009, I have led a program of longitudinal ethnographic research with families experiencing homelessness in northern New England. This work is the subject of my book, Families on the Edge: Experiences of Homelessness and Care in Rural New England. The longitudinal approach of this research enables insight into the constellation of structural, social, and personal factors that shape outcomes for families, with some achieving a fragile stability while others have been shattered by the impress of harmful systems, losses, and trauma. As an engaged scholar, I am working to translate insights from close attention to lived experiences of families into actionable recommendations for change to address the housing crisis and to improve health and wellbeing in the region. My research on rural homelessness has led me to pursue additional research focused on intersections of rurality and health.

Another key area of my recent research examines digital technologies as a new treatment paradigm in mental health. This research has been guided by anthropological approaches that emphasize lived experience and underscore the complexity of psychiatric recovery. In this body of work, I have led a multidisciplinary research team to conduct multi-sited ethnographic research to examine how persons with serious mental illnesses understand and use technology in their everyday lives; put forth arguments for the need for technology-based approaches in mental health care to be oriented toward meaningful recovery and attentive to health equity; and led the development, implementation, and evaluation of an innovative approach to supporting persons with serious mental illnesses to use digital technologies to support recovery.

Throughout my career, I have sought to build connections between anthropology and medicine. To that end, much of my work is deeply collaborative. My longstanding interests in the culture of biomedicine and commitment to applying anthropological approaches within medicine directly inform my research collaborations with colleagues in medicine, health services research, and public health as well as my work co-leading the Dartmouth Healthcare Foundations program, a suite of educational offerings designed to address endemic challenges in contemporary healthcare by centering humanistic approaches in the work of care.