Ian Whitmarsh
Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology, UC San Francisco
- Phone: 415/476-6164
- Fax: 415/476-6715
Profile
Expertise
Medical Anthropology, cultures of science and technology, biomedicineBiography
Ian Whitmarsh is an assistant professor of anthropology at UC San Francisco. He was previously a postdoctoral associate in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Genome Sciences at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University.
Whitmarsh’s research explores tensions in the uses of biomedical categories linking race and disease among researchers, medical practitioners, government officials, and patients. He has conducted ethnographic research following a US-based asthma genetics study conducted in Barbados, exploring how the study is creating new regimes of care, state interventions, and unexpected biomedical diagnostics. His current research is in the Caribbean and the United States on the emerging biomedical category of the metabolic syndrome, a diagnostic that links obesity, abnormal cholesterol, diabetes and hypertension as risk factors for heart disease. These projects examine the ways vernaculars of ethnicity, gender, and illness influence and are reshaped by the expansion of bioscience into new health conditions and across national borders. He is the author of Biomedical Ambiguity: Race, Asthma, and the Contested Meaning of Genetic Research in the Caribbean.
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