Amy Dao PhD

Amy Dao works on public health issues ranging from healthcare in immigrant communities and healthcare in marginalized communities to the availability and adoption of health insurance in Vietnam. She is interested in the social and structural conditions that shape health and health care. She is part of a multi-year project with UC Riverside’s Center for Health Disparities Research called “Narrating the Pandemic” which documents the life stories of individuals, families, and communities as they navigate shelter-in-place orders, healthcare needs, and structural vulnerabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To give all of her students the opportunity giving students the chance to participate in research and see how ethnographic research can address current real-world issues, students in her Anthropology Methods class conducted interviews with people living in multi-generational households to learn how they navigate healthcare and health safety precautions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students learned the ethics of research involving human subjects and the skills to conduct participant observation, in-depth interviewing, cultural material analysis, and data analysis. They also begin to understand how structural inequities result in poorer health outcomes for disenfranchised communities.