Prof Melissa Parker
Professor of Medical Anthropology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Type of engagement
Prof Melissa Parker is a Guest Chair for the Joep Lange Chair & Fellows Program
Research focus within the Joep Lange Chair & Fellows Program
Prof. Melissa Parker is a member of the Department of Global Health and Development. Her research builds on a multi-disciplinary training in Human Sciences and a DPhil (which combined methods and approaches current in social and biological anthropology) from Oxford University. Research questions typically emerge from extensive periods of ethnographic fieldwork and engage with global health policies and practice. Topics investigated include epidemic preparedness and response, mental health and healing in war zones, social and political legacies of mass forced displacement, and biosocial approaches to the control of neglected tropical diseases in Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania.
In 2014, she established the Ebola Response Anthropology Platform with colleagues from Sierra Leone and the UK. This proved a useful model for enabling expertise across the social sciences to useful inform the delivery of humanitarian assistance, and the Platform now engages with a broader range of issues through the Social Sciences in Humanitarian Action Platform. In 2020 and 2021, Prof. Parker contributed to the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours and the ethnicity subgroup of SAGE.