Alexandra Brewis

Alexandra Brewis is a biocultural anthropologist and President’s Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. She is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), is senior editor (Medical Anthropology) for Social Science and Medicine, and recently served as President of the Human Biology Association. As an ASU administrator, she founded the Center for Global Health in 2006 and served as Director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change (2010-2017) and Associate Vice President for Social Sciences (2014-2017).

Brewis' research is concerned with understanding how low social position and resource insecurity (lack of food or water, especially) interact with disease meanings, experiences, and diagnoses to exacerbate the psychosocial stresses that worsen physical and mental health. Basically, she is interested in demonstrating empirically the mechanisms that connect low power to worse health, so we can find the best ways to bring health to more people.

Her research program has produced six authored books, 5 edited volumes, and over 180 journal articles and book chapters. One recent book (with Amber Wutich) is the prize-winning Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting: Stigma and the Undoing of Global Health, described in reviews as a "boundary-breaking book that should be required reading for anyone interested in public health, medicine, and anthropology. It stands as an exemplar for public scholarship."

Alex was trained in human biology, cultural-medical anthropology, and demography at the University of Auckland, University of Arizona, and Brown University. Before joining ASU in 2005, she taught at the University of Auckland and the University of Georgia. Committed to innovation in instruction, she designed and launched the nation's first (and still largest) global health degree.