Merrill Singer PhD

Merrill Singer is a medical anthropologist and a professor at the University of Connecticut. At the University of Connecticut, he teaches anthropology and community medicine. He earned his M.A. from California State University, Northridge, and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Utah. In his role as the director of the Center for Community Health Research at the Hispanic Health Council, he has pioneered two new public health concepts – syndemics and oppression illness. Syndemics is a term he uses to explain disease clusters in populations, with an emphasis on the influence of social conditions. Oppression illness is a consequence of the internalization of discrimination and its impacts on health.

He has also researched drug and alcohol use, writing Drugging the Poor: Legal and Illegal Drugs and Social Inequality, which argues that drug use among the poor is self-medication and that the vilification of those people ignores real problems of social inequality. His research in medical anthropology has been funded by multiple grants from public and private sources. Through those grants, he has studied oral HIV testing among injection drug users in Brazil, sexual communication and risk in inner-city young adults, and the Work and Learn Model. Singer was the inaugural recipient of the Practicing Anthropology Award by the Society for Medical Anthropology and received a Career Award from the same organization seven years later.