Center for Health and Wellbeing

Elizabeth Mitchell Armstrong has research interests in public health, the history and sociology of medicine, social determinants of health, and medical ethics. She is the author of Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the Diagnosis of Moral Disorder (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) and articles on family planning, medical mistakes, adolescent motherhood, and the sociology of pregnancy and birth. Her current research includes a longitudinal study of agenda setting around disease in the U.S. and a study of fetal personhood and obstetrical ethics. She holds a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and the Woodrow Wilson School and is a faculty associate at the Office of Population Research. She is faculty director of the Health and Health Policy Certificate. She was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan from 1998-2000. M.P.A. Princeton University; Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania.

Professor of Anthropology
e-mail: jbiehl@princeton.edu
View João Biehl's website.
Phone: (609) 258-6327
Office: 202 58 Prospect Ave.

João Biehl is Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. He is the author of Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment (2005) and of Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival (2007). He is also co-edited the book Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (2007). Vita garnered six book awards, including the 2007 Margaret Mead Award. Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2001, Biehl was a NIMH postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. He earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley (1999) and a Ph.D. in religion from the Graduate Theological Union (1996). He earned undergraduate degrees in theology and journalism and a master’s degree in philosophy from academic institutions in Brazil. Biehl was a member of the School of Social Science and of the School of Historical Studies of the Institute for Advanced Study and a visiting professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. He has recently been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his next book project—The Valley of Lamentation: Spirituality and War in a German Community in 19th Century Brazil. Biehl is also the recipient of a Global Health and Infectious Disease grant of Princeton’s Grand Challenges Initiative. He is leading a new research and teaching project on the aftermath of large-scale drug rollouts in resource-poor settings in Latin America and Africa (with a focus on drug resistance and access to second-line treatments and on judicial claims to high-cost medicines). Professor Biehl received Princeton’s Presidential Distinguished Teaching Award in 2005.

Professor of Economics and Public Affairs
e-mail: accase@princeton.edu
View Anne Case's website.
Phone: (609) 258-2177
Office: 367 Wallace Hall

Anne Case's current research interests are in development and health economics. She is researching a variety of aspects of health and well-being in South Africa, and the determinants of health both in the US and in developing countries. Case directs the Research Program in Development Studies at Princeton University. Ph.D. Princeton University

Professor of Psychology
e-mail: jdc@princeton.edu
View Jonathan Cohen's website.
Phone: (609) 258-2696
Office: 3-N-4A Green Hall

Jonathan Cohen is the director of the Center for the Study of Mind, Brain and Behavior. He holds an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania as well as a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Carnegie Mellon University. Before coming to Princeton in 1998 he held joint appointments at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. He has retained his appointment at Pittsburgh and continues to do some clinical research there. Research in his laboratory focuses on the biological mechanisms underlying cognitive control. M.D. University of Pennsylvania; Ph.D. Carnegie Mellon University.

Professor of History
e-mail: creager@princeton.edu
View Angela Creager's website.
Phone: (609) 258-1680
Office: 125 Dickinson Hall

Angela Creager specializes in the history of the modern life sciences. She is author of several articles on the history of biochemistry and molecular biology and one book, The Life of a Virus: Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930-1965 (Chicago, 2002). She is currently studying the effects of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's radioisotope distribution program on biological and medical research after World War II. Her other interests include the relationship of feminism to modern science and historical interactions between the physical and biological sciences. Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1991.

Professor of Economics and International Affairs
e-mail: deaton@princeton.edu
View Angus Deaton's website.
Phone: (609) 258-5967
Office: 328 Wallace Hall

His main areas of interest are in health and economic development. He has taught at Cambridge University and at the University of Bristol. In 1978 he was the first recipient of the Econometric Society's Frisch Medal for applied econometrics, and is a fellow of the Econometric Society, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the British Academy. His current research includes mortality and morbidity and poverty and inequality, with specific interests in India and South Africa. Ph.D. Cambridge University.

Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Affairs
email: tdinkelm@princeton.edu
View Taryn Dinkelman's website.
Phone: (609) 258-6993
Office: 357 Wallace Hall

Taryn Dinkelman has research interests in development and labor economics.  Her current work focuses on how infrastructure affects labor markets in developing countries (rural electrification in South Africa, cell phone network expansion in Malawi), and on how children born during a drought grow up to have poorer long-term human capital outcomes. Ph.D. University of Michigan 2008.

A specialist in demography and epidemiology, Goldman’s current research examines the role of social and economic factors on adult health and the physiological pathways through which these factors operate. She has designed several large-scale surveys, including the EGSF in Guatemala, focused on the determinants of illness and health care choices for women and children in rural areas, and an ongoing data collection effort SEBAS in Taiwan, focused on the linkages among the social environment, stress, and health among older persons. She has served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a member of numerous committees of the IOM, NAS, and NIH, including the Board on Global Health, the Committee on National Statistics, and the NICHD Population Research Subcommittee. She has also served in various capacities of the Population Association of America and the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. Goldman is Professor of Demography and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, a research associate at the Office of Population of Research, and Director of Graduate Studies of the Program in Population Studies.

Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Public Affairs
email: grenfell@princeton.edu
Phone: (609) 258-7085
Office: 314 Wallace Hall

Bryan Grenfell is a population biologist, focusing in particular on the dynamics and control of infectious diseases in space and time.  He combines the development of theory with analyses of empirical data sets from a range of diseases, including measles, rotavirus and influenza.

Originally trained as a zoologist, Grenfell has worked on the dynamics of epidemics since 1980.  he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Charles and Marie Robertson
Visiting Professor in Economic Development
e-mail: jhammer@princeton.edu
Phone: (609) 258-6153
Office: 318 Wallace Hall

Jeff Hammer’s teaching and research is on the economics of developing countries. His current research projects include measuring and improving the quality of medical care, primarily in India; absenteeism of teachers and health workers; policy-related determinants of health status; and improving service delivery through better accountability mechanisms. He came to Princeton in 2008 after 25 years at the World Bank. While there he worked on a wide variety of countries and issues related to public economics, public expenditures, and policy reform in the social sectors, particularly health. His last three years were in the New Delhi office and he maintains a continuing interest in South Asia. His Ph.D. in economics is from MIT.

Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Emeritus
Senior Scholar, Woodrow Wilson School
e-mail: kahneman@princeton.edu
View DanielKahneman's website.
Phone: (609) 258-2280
Office: 322 Wallace Hall

Formerly a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, a fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Kahneman is a member of the National Academy of Science, the Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Econometric Society. He has been the recipient of many awards, among them the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (1982) and the Grawemeyer Prize (2002), both jointly with Amos Tversky, the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists (1995), the Hilgard Award for Career Contributions to General Psychology (1995), and the 2002 Nobel Prize in economic sciences, and the Lifetime Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association (2007). He holds honorary degrees from numerous Universities.

Alan Krueger's primary research and teaching interests are in the general areas of labor economics, industrial relations, and social insurance. He is the author of Education Matters: A Selection of Essays on Education and coauthor of Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage and the editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. His current research projects include an examination of disability and the workforce; a study of the relationship between school quality and labor market success; a study of the U.S. employment miracle; and an analysis of the impact of technological change on the labor market. He has also been named a Sloan fellow, an NBER Olin fellow, was elected a fellow of the Econometric Society, and was awarded the Kershaw Prize by the Association for Public Policy and Management in 1997. He served as the chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor in 1994-95. He is the director of the Survey Research Center at Princeton University. Ph.D. Harvard University.

Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Affairs
email: kuziemko@princeton.edu
View Ilyana Kuziemko's website.
Phone: 609-258-6917
Office: 361 Wallace Hall

Ilyana Kuziemko's research focuses mostly on social factors related to inequality and poverty in the U.S., especially factors related to crime, law enforcement and education. She has also done some work with a more international focus, including research on the determinents of U.S. foreign aid and child health in India. B.A., Mathematics, Oxford University; PhD, Harvard University.
 

Associate Professor of Politics
e-mail: esl@princeton.edu
View Evan Lieberman's website.
Phone: 609-258-6833
Office: 239 Corwin Hall

Evan Lieberman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics. His main research interests are in the politics of ethnic/racial identity and the formation of public policy and state capacity in developing countries. He is currently carrying out research on the politics of government responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in developing countries. He was a Fulbright Scholar in South Africa in 1997-8, and was a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar from 2000-2. He is the founding director of the Princeton AIDS Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson School. Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley.

Associate Professor of Sociology
e-mail: slynch@princeton.edu
View Scott Lynch's website.
Phone: (609) 258-7255s
Office: 114 Wallace Hall

Scott recently completed his PhD in Sociology at Duke University, where he also obtained an MS in statistics. His research interests include the demography of health and aging and Bayesian statistical methods. Some of his current work focuses on the effect of education on life course trajectories of health, and the role of mortality selection in concealing the shape of these trajectories. Other current work includes developing Bayesian approaches to generating multistate life tables. PhD. Duke University.

Senior Policy Analyst, Woodrow Wilson School and Molecular Biology. Lecturer with the rank of Professor in Molecular Biology
e-mail: amahmoud@princeton.edu
Phone: (609) 258-8557
Office: 228 Lewis Thomas Laboratory

Adel Mahmoud M.D., Ph.D., former president of Merck Vaccines and an expert on disease control in the developing world, has been appointed to the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University as a Senior Molecular Biologist. In addition, Mahmoud will have a joint appointment to the University's Department of Molecular Biology as a Lecturer with the Rank of Professor. Mahmoud's research and teaching at the School will focus on medical and policy issues related to microbial threats - life-threatening transmissible diseases such as pandemic influenza and the use of microorganisms for bioterrorism - as well on the means by which vaccines are introduced into the developing world.

Sara McLanahan is the coauthor of Fathers Under Fire; Social Policies for Children; Growing Up with a Single Parent; Child Support and Child Well-being; and Single Mothers and Their Children: A New American Dilemma. She has served on the boards of the American Sociological Association and the Population Association of America and is currently a member of the board on Families, Youth, and Children of the National Academy of Sciences. An associate of the Office of Population Research, her research interests include family demography, stratification, and social policy. She teaches courses on poverty and family policy. She directs the Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing. Ph.D. University of Texas.

Dan Notterman, a molecular biologist and a physician specializing in pediatric critical care medicine has focused his laboratory on genome-scale studies of colon cancer. Trained in Arnold Levine’s lab at Princeton, he returned to Molecular Biology in 2007 from Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, where he was Professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Genetics, and Chair of the Department of Pediatrics. Since coming to Princeton, his lab has started a collaboration with Princeton’s Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study, a nationally representative, longitudinal study of approximately 4,900 new parents (3,700 of whom were unmarried at the time of the birth) and their children followed from birth. Notterman’s lab is evaluating polymorphic genes that may interact with a stressful environment to foster substance abuse, violence, depression, and other health-related outcomes. A strong advocate for improving the health care system as it affects children, he is a member of many governmental and non-governmental advisory committees, including the FDA’s Pediatric Advisory Committee and the New Jersey Council of Children’s Hospital’s, which he chairs.

Professor of Economics and Public Affairs
e-mail: cpaxson@princeton.edu
View Christina Paxson's website.
Phone: (609) 258-6474
Office: 316 Wallace Hall

Christina Paxson is the founder of the Center for Health and Wellbeing, an interdisciplinary health research center in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She served as its director from its inception to July, 2009 when she was appointed to serve as dean of the Woodrow Wilson School. She is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, where she is a member of the programs on Aging, Health, and Children; a Research Associate of Princeton’s Office of Population Research; and a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Socioeconomic Status and Health. Her research interests are in the areas of applied economics, health, and development economics. Her current research focuses on economic status and children’s health outcomes. She is the Principal Investigator of several NIH-funded studies, including "Economic Status, Public Policy, and Child Neglect", "Parental Resources and Child Wellbeing" and "College Education and Health". She is also working on a study of child health in Ecuador. Ph.D. Columbia University, 1987

Professor of Economics and Public Affairs
e-mail:reinhard@princeton.edu
View Uwe Reinhardt's website.
Phone: (609) 258-4781
Office: 351 Wallace Hall

Recognized as one of the nation's leading authorities on health care economics, Reinhardt has been a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences since 1978. He was a member of the National Leadership Commission on Health Care, a private-sector initiative established to develop options for health care reform, and is a past president of the Association of Health Services Research, on whose board he still serves. From 1986 to 1995 he served as a commissioner on the Physician Payment Review Committee, established in 1986 by Congress to advise it on issues related to the payment of physicians. Reinhardt is or was a member of numerous editorial boards, among them the Journal of Health Economics, the Milbank Memorial Quarterly, Health Affairs, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. Ph.D. Yale University.

Assistant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs
email: greniers@princeton.edu
Phone: (609) 258-5513
Office: 257 Wallace Hall

Georges Reniers joined Princeton University in 2009.  He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and worked for the United Nations in Ethiopia prior to entering graduate school.  Most of his work has been on the demography of African populations.  He has published on methodological issues in the measurement and estimation of HIV prevalence and AIDS mortality, and on the behavioral mechanisms that account for the unequal spread of HIV.  He continues to be involved in research projects in Ethiopia, Malawi and South Africa.

Senior Molecular Biologist
Lecturer with the rank of Professor in Molecular Biology
e-mail: lrosenberg@molbio.princeton.edu
View Leon Rosenberg's website.
Phone: (609) 258-5368
Office: 253 Lewis Thomas Laboratory

Before joining Princeton, Leon Rosenberg served Bristol-Myers Squibb as President of the Pharmaceutical Research Institute from 1991 to 1997, and as Senior Vice President of Scientific Affairs until February of 1998. Prior to joining Bristol-Myers Squibb, Dr. Rosenberg was Dean of the Yale University School of Medicine, a position he had held since 1984. Dr. Rosenberg currently serves on the Boards of Directors of the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute, the Association for Patient-Oriented Research, Karo Bio AB, Medicines for Malaria Venture, and Hana Biosciences, Inc. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. His research is aimed at gaining a better understanding of the national enterprise that supports life sciences and medical research.

Professor of Economics and Public Affairs
e-mail:mrothsch@princeton.edu
View Michael Rothschild's website.
Phone: (609) 258-0161
Office: 207 Fisher Hall

An economic theorist, he has written on a wide range of topics, including decision making under uncertainty, investment, taxation, finance, and jury-decision processes. More recently, his research interests have included education and matching. Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School from 1995 to 2002.

Assistant Professor of Economics and Public Affairs
e-mail: sschulho@princeton.edu
View Sam Schulhofer-Wohl's website.
Phone: (609) 258-7392
Office: 363 Wallace Hall

Sam Schulhofer-Wohl's research interests are in economic development, macroeconomics and demography.  Recent projects have focused on heterogeneity in risk preferences and income processes; the welfare costs of risk; and models for age, period and cohort effects.  He is an assistant professor of economics and public affairs.  Ph.D., University of Chicago.

Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs
e-mail: shafir@princeton.edu
View Eldar Shafir's website.
Phone: (609) 258-5624
Office: 3-S-14 Green Hall

Trained as a cognitive scientist, his work focuses on descriptive analyses of inference, judgment, and decision making, and on issues related to behavioral economics, focusing primarily on how people make judgments and decisions in situations of conflict and uncertainty. Most recently, his research interests have focused on decision making in the context of poverty. Awarded the Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award by the Society for Judgment and Decision Making in 1992, and the Chase Memorial Award in 1993, he has been a member of numerous editorial boards, among them the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Cognition, and Psychological Science. Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Professor of Economics and Public Affairs; Past President of Princeton University
e-mail: hts@princeton.edu
View Harold Shapiro's website.
Phone: (609) 258-6184
Office: 359 Wallace Hall

His fields of special interest in economics include econometrics, science policy, and the evolution of post-secondary education. He was a member of President Bush's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, chaired the Institute of Medicine's Committee to Study Employer-Based Health Benefits, and currently serves as chair of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission. The editor (with former Princeton President William G. Bowen) of Universities and Their Leadership, his published works include A Regional Econometric Forecasting System Major Economic Areas of Michigan (coauthor) and Tradition and Change. A member of the Institute of Medicine and a fellow of the American Philosophical Society of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he has taught at the University of Michigan (in addition to serving as its president) and has been a research scientist at the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations and at the Institute of Public Policy Studies. Ph.D. Princeton University

Dr. Lee M. Silver is a Professor at Princeton University in the Department of Molecular Biology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is the author of "Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family," published in 15 languages. He has also authored an undergraduate textbook in genetics, and a textbook for professionals on mouse genetics. His current book, to be published by Ecco Press, is titled "Challenging Mother Nature: Biotechnology in a Spiritual World."

In 1993, Professor Silver was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 1995, he received an unsolicited 10 year National Institutes of Health MERIT award. He has published over 180 scientific articles in the fields of genetics, evolution, reproduction, embryology, computer modeling, and behavioral science, and other scholarly papers on topics at the interface between biotechnology, law, ethics, and religion. He has been elected to the governing boards of the Genetics Society of America and the International Mammalian Genome Society. He was a member of the New Jersey Bioethics Commission Task Force formed to recommend reproductive policy for the New Jersey State Legislature, and has testified on reproductive and genetic technologies before U.S. Congressional and New York State Senate committees. He has appeared on numerous television and radio programs including NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, the Jim Lehrer PBS News Hour, ABC Nightline, The ABC World Report with Peter Jennings, 60 Minutes, and many others in the U.S. and other countries.

He has centered his research in three principal areas: identification of social, biological, and environmental risks associated with vector-borne diseases in the tropics, integration of psychosocial and biological evidence to characterize pathways to alternative states of health, and health impact assessments associated with economic development projects. His research program has included studies of: (1) the impact of migration and urbanization on malaria transmission in the western Amazon region of Brazil and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; (2) the biological correlates of well-being and health consequences of gene-environment interactions focused on the social environment; and (3) potential health impacts of the Chad-Cameroon petroleum development and pipeline project and the Nam Theun 2 Hydroelectric project in Laos. During the next few years there will be in-depth investigations of the biology of well-being, primarily based on accumulating data in the Mid-life in the United States (MIDUS) national survey and several community-based studies. A new line of inquiry focused on diagnosis of multiple parasitic infections using metabolite profiles derived from NMR spectra will be substantially expanded to include studies of disease pathogenesis and parasite responses to pharmacological interventions. Metabolite profiles will also provide the basis for new operationalizations of the concept of allostatic load. This technology is anticipated to provide a much more refined picture of the biology of well-being than heretofore.

Formerly chair of the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health and professor of economics and statistics at Yale University, he has served as chair of the National Research Council Committee on National Statistics and as chair of the Steering Committee for Social and Economic Research in the World Health Organization Tropical Disease Research (TDR) program. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1994) and was a Guggenheim fellow in 1981-1982. Ph.D. Stanford University.

Formerly a professor of sociology and chair of the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago and recent past president of the Population Association of America, Tienda is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy for Political and Social Sciences. Her current research focuses on the changing demography of higher education. She is the author, coauthor, or editor of numerous books, and articles, including Ethnicity and Causal Mechanisms (forthcoming 2005), Youth in Cities (2003), The Color of Opportunity (2001), Divided Opportunities: Minorities, Poverty, and Social Policy (1988); and The Hispanic Population of the United States (1987). Ph.D. University of Texas, Austin.

Assistant Professor of History
e-mail: htilley@princeton.edu
Phone: (609) 258-7974
Office:  129 Dickinson Hall

Helen Tilley specializes in the history of science in colonial Africa, placing particular emphasis on environmental, medical, and anthropological sciences. Her research examines the mutual influences of imperialism and disciplinary development. She is also interested in exploring intersections between environmental history and the history of science, especially in tropical environments, as well as the history of racial science and medicine. These are themes she covers in her first book, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Science, Nature, and Imperial Development in the Tropics (forthcoming 2007/08). She has written several articles and book chapters on the history of ecology, eugenics, agriculture, and epidemiology in tropical Africa and has edited a volume titled Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism, and the Politics of Knowledge (2007).

Professor of Economics and Public Affairs; Director, Office of Population Research
e-mail: trussell@princeton.edu
View James Trussell's website.
Phone: (609) 258-4946
Office: 202 Wallace Hall

James Trussell is Professor of Economics and Public Affairs and Director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. He is the author or co-author of more than 200 scientific publications, primarily in the areas of reproductive health and demographic methodology. His recent research has been focused in three areas: emergency contraception, contraceptive failure, and the cost-effectiveness of contraception. He has actively promoted making emergency contraception more widely available as an important step in reducing the incidence of unintended pregnancy and the need for abortion; in addition to his research on this topic, he maintains an emergency contraception website (not-2-late.com) and designed and launched a toll-free emergency contraception hotline (1-888-NOT-2-LATE). Dr. Trussell received his B.S. degree in mathematics from Davidson College in 1971, a B.Phil. in economics from Oxford University in 1973, and a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 1975. He is a member of the board of directors of the NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation and The Alan Guttmacher Institute, a member of the National Medical Committee of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and a member of the Council of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population. He serves on the editorial advisory committees of Contraception, Perspectives in Sexual and Reproductive Health, and Contraceptive Technology Update.

Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies
email: ezhang@princeton.edu
Phone: (609) 258-4775
Office: 211 Jones Hall

Everett Zhang received his Ph.D. in social/cultural anthropology from University of California at Berkeley and did postdoctoral studies in medical anthropology at Harvard.  Born in China, he did his undergraduate studies at Sichuan University in Chengdu and graduate studies for his first MA at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.  He worked as a researcher and the executive editor of a journal in the Academy, before he came to the U.S. to pursue his Ph.D.  He worked on the transformation of the Chinese society over the past several decades seen through the changes in the body, medicine and sexuality.  He won the Stirling Prize from the Society for Psychological Anthropology of American Anthropological Association in 2007.  His book manuscript Impotence in China: An Illness of Chinese Modernity will be published by University of California Press.  With the support of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded through the American Council of Learned Societies, he has been working on the second book project concerning the changing governance of life and the collective structure of feelings in China through the comparison between two major earthquakes over the past thirty some years and the mourning over the Graveyard for the Red Guards.