Catherine Panter-Brick is the Bruce A. and Davi-Ellen Chabner Professor of Anthropology, Health, and Global Affairs at Yale University. She is an expert on risk and resilience, having spent three decades working with people affected by war, poverty, and marginalization. A medical anthropologist, Panter-Brick was trained in both human biology and the social sciences. She has extensive experience leading mixed-methods research, having directed over forty interdisciplinary projects in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Jordan, Mexico, Nepal, Niger, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, the UK and the USA. For her work in humanitarian areas, she received the Lucy Mair Medal, awarded by the Royal Anthropology Institute to honor excellence in the application of anthropology to the active recognition of human dignity.
Panter-Brick directs the Global Health Studies Multidisciplinary Academic Program, the Program on Conflict, Resilience, and Health and the Program on Stress and Family Resilience. She holds joint appointments in the Jackson School of Global Affairs and the Department of Anthropology, and a secondary appointment at the Yale School of Public Health. She is also Senior Editor of the interdisciplinary journal Social Science & Medicine, President of the Human Biology Association, and Head of one of Yale’s Residential Colleges. Schooled in France and the UK, she was a Research Associate of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Senior Research Fellow at the Agence Française de Développement (AFD), Professor of Anthropology at Durham University, and Research Fellow at St Hugh’s College, Oxford University.
On the issue of resilience and mental health, Panter-Brick has been a keynote speaker at the United Nations, contributed to international media broadcasts, and presented at international iNGO dissemination events, the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the United States Institute of Peace. She leads research initiatives to develop effective partnerships between scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. Her work with Syrian refugee youth in Jordan is an example of scientific research evaluating the extent to which interventions can alleviate stress, boost resilience, and improve lives in war-affected communities (https://www.elrha.org/project/yale-psychosocial-call2/). She publishes extensively in biomedical and social sciences journals (see https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=panter-brick), and has coedited seven books, most recently Medical Humanitarianism (Penn Press 2015) and Pathways to Peace (MIT Press, 2014).
Her teaching at Yale includes interdisciplinary courses on global health equity, humanitarian interventions, conflict and resilience.