Joseph S. Alter teaches anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh and has published a number of books, including The Wrestler’s Body, Knowing Dil Das, Gandhi’s Body, Asian Medicine and Globalization, Yoga in Modern India, and Moral Materialism: Sex and Masculinity in Modern India. His research is based in South Asia and is currently focused on the cultural history of nature cure as a globalized system of medicine, biosemiotics and social theory, and the natural history of animals in the human imagination.

Mary K. Anglin is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky, where she recently completed a term as department chair. Through long-term ethnographic research, based in urban northern California, she has examined breast cancer as a public health problem and a social crisis, with attention to the role of social activism in challenging biomedical views of “risk” as well as approaches to treatment. Her recent work explores differences of ethnicity, race, nationality, and social class among women diagnosed with breast cancer, and the implications of such differences for quality of life and survival. Future plans include a return to ethnographic work on issues of environmental contamination in Appalachia, with attention to their impact on communities and human health. The theme that unites these various projects is an abiding interest in health inequities and social justice and the potential uses of a critically applied anthropology.

George J. Armelagos (1936–2014) was a globally known biological anthropologist, and Goodrich C. White Professor of Anthropology at Emory University. Armelagos’s work had a significant impact on paleopathology, skeletal biology, the anthropology of infectious diseases, and bioarchaeology. His many publications have been honored for their contributions to the theoretical and methodological understanding human disease, diet, and biosocial variation, including the social interpretation of race, within an evolutionary context. His accolades include the Viking Fund Award from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Franz Boas Award from the American Anthropological Association, and the Charles Darwin Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

Hans A. Baer is associate professor/honorary research fellow in the School of Social Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He has published 19 books and some 180 book chapters and refereed articles on a diversity of research topics, including Mormonism, African American religion, sociopolitical life in East Germany, critical medical anthropology, medical pluralism in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, the critical anthropology of climate change, and Australian climate politics. He is coauthor, along with Merrill Singer and Ida Susser, of Medical Anthropology and the World System: A Critical Perspective (3rd edition, 2013).

Nicola Bulled, PhD, is a medical anthropologist on the faculty of the Interdisciplinary and Global Studies program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA. Her research has focused on the biopolitics of global infectious disease prevention and management efforts, working with disadvantaged and vulnerable populations in the United States, Lesotho, and South Africa. She also has worked on public health programming projects with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, Boston Medical Center, Boston University, Institute for Community Health in Cambridge, Boston Public Health Commission, Massachusetts State Laboratory Institute, and the Centers for Disease Control. Her current research examines public resistance to health interventions, especially what drives it, the forms it takes, and how contemporary global public health architecture might be restructured to address this issue.

Maryann Cairns is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of South Florida (USF). Her research focuses on issues of water, sanitation, and wastewater treatment in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her dissertation research was funded through a grant from the National Science Foundation. She has also received funding from the American Water Works Association, USF’s Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean, and the University of South Florida Challenge Grant Program.

Elizabeth Cartwright is professor in the Department of Anthropology and is the director of the Hispanic Health Projects and the Latino Studies Program at Idaho State University. She has published widely on structural vulnerability and health among immigrant and ethnic populations and has worked in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia. She focuses on systematic ethnographic methodologies that use text-based narratives and visual data. She has extensive experience in obstetric nursing and publishes in the fields of anthropology, nursing, and women’s health. In addition to her academic work, Cartwright is the co-founder of Crescendos Alliance, a nonprofit organization that uses community-based, participatory research to improve the lives of farmworkers in the United States and South America. She is an associate editor for the journal Medical Anthropology.

Melissa Checker is the Hagedorn Professor of Urban Studies at Queens College, and associate professor of Anthropology and Environmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on environmental justice activism in the United States, urban sustainability, and environmental gentrification. She is coeditor of Sustainability in the Global City: Myth and Practice (2015), as well as the author of Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town (2005) and the coeditor of Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life (2004). She has published numerous articles in academic journals as well as mainstream publications.

Ajiang Chen is professor of sociology at Hohai University, where he chairs the Environment and Society Research Centre. He holds a PhD in sociology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He has carried out research on environmental sociology and rural development in several fieldsites in China. His books include Secondary Anxiety: A Social Interpretation of Pollution in the Taihu Basin and Cancer Village Research: Understanding and Responding to Environmental Health Risks.

Abigail Dumes received her PhD in sociocultural anthropology from Yale University. She is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Divided Bodies: The Practice and Politics of Lyme Disease in the United States.

Laura Eichelberger is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and a former cancer prevention fellow at the National Cancer Institute (National Institutes of Health) in the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics. Her research focuses on water, sustainability, and health to explore how political, economic, and ecologic factors intersect to shape disease risks historically and throughout the life course.

Chris Degeling is a veterinarian, health social scientist, and field philosopher whose interests include the social and cultural dimensions and ethics of human–animal interactions. His work is interdisciplinary and appears in public health, social science, philosophy, and veterinary journals. He is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney, and a member of the Sydney Environment Institute and the Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Disease and Biosecurity.

Lisa L. Gezon has been doing research in Madagascar on issues of human–environmental relationships since 1990, with a focus on drugs and health since 2004. Her recent book is entitled Drug Effects: Khat in Biocultural and Socioeconomic Perspective (2012). She has been teaching at the University of West Georgia since 1996 and is currently professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology. Her current research is on holistic health and wellness in Guatemala and in the United States.

Hannah Graff is senior policy researcher at the UK Health Forum, an international nongovernmental organization focused on the primary prevention of noncommunicable diseases. Hannah holds a BA (Hons) in Anthropology from the College of Wooster (USA) where she focused on disease understanding and experience cross-culturally. She went on to read for an MPhil in Medical Anthropology at the University of Oxford with a focus on place, disease etiology and burden, and the influences of policy. Hannah has experience in international public health policy research and development with particular work on obesity, HIV/AIDS, the built environment, and health in all policies.

Kristin N. Harper is a science writer and editor. She earned her MPH in global epidemiology and her PhD in population biology, ecology, and evolution from Emory University, performed research at Columbia University as a Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholar, then founded Harper Health & Science Communications. Her area of expertise is infectious diseases, and she employs genomics, epidemiology, and paleopathology to better understand pathogen evolution and the impact of microbes on human history.

José E. Hasemann Lara has an MA in anthropology and an MPH in global infectious diseases, both from the University of South Florida. He currently is a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Connecticut, focusing on citizenship, derogation, urbanization, political ecology, infectious diseases, and public health. His dissertation research is being carried out in Brownsville, Texas and Tegucigalpa, Honduras on dengue fever.

Kirsten Hastrup is professor of anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She has a long-term interest in the entwinement of environmental and social history, notably in Iceland, where she has done extensive historical and ethnographic research and published several monographs spanning the period from the Middle Ages to modern times. Over the past eight years she has studied and published on the development in High Arctic Greenland, where a community of hunters has to reorient themselves as the dramatically changing sea ice makes their livelihood increasingly precarious, aggravated also by marine pollution. Among her recent publications is the edited volume Anthropology and Nature (2014).

G. Derrick Hodge is an economic anthropologist whose work has focused on how material logics condition cultural systems and public ethics. He has maintained a 15-year field presence in Havana, where he works with youth in the post-socialist transformations. He is currently the director of research at the General Commission on Religion and Race, and Affiliated Research Faculty at George Mason University.

Stephanie C. Kane is a professor in the School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University. Her research on environmental and social justice dimensions of urban water ecology and infrastructure has been published as a book, Where the Rivers Meet the Sea: The Political Ecology of Water (2013), as articles, in Human Organization, PoLAR, Journal of Folklore Research, Crime Media Culture, Social Text, and book chapters.

Helen Kopnina (PhD, Cambridge University, 2002) is a researcher in the fields of environmental education and environmental social sciences. Helen is currently employed at both at the Leiden University and at The Hague University of Applied Science (HHS) in The Netherlands. At the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology she is an assistent professor of environmental anthropology. At the HHS, she is a coordinator and lecturer on the Sustainable Business program. Kopnina is the author of over 60 peer-reviewed articles and (co)author and (co)editor of 12 books, including Sustainability: Key Issues (2015), Culture and Conservation: Beyond Athropocentrism (2015), and Handbook of Environmental Anthropology (2016).

Gina Larsen is a researcher at the University of South Florida. Her research focuses on the links between environmental destruction and human health and well-being. Her master’s thesis research was funded by the National Science Foundation. She has also worked on National Science Foundation and Environmental Protection Agency funded projects focused on water politics and the human dimensions of climate change.

Peter C. Little is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rhode Island College. He earned his PhD in applied anthropology from Oregon State University and is author of Toxic Town: IBM, Pollution, and Industrial Risks (2014). Little’s interests in anthropology are focused largely on environmental and medical anthropology, with a strong focus on political ecology and science and technology studies. Fascinated by the complexities of human–environment relations and the neoliberal and biopolitical dimensions of public health, ecology, and economy, Little has published on the health and environmental justice dimensions of high-tech industrial pollution. He is currently developing an ethnographic research project on the political ecology of electronic waste (e-waste) in Accra, Ghana, exploring how high-tech donations and the global e-waste economy invoke environmental health disaster.

Anna Lora-Wainwright is associate professor in the human geography of China at the University of Oxford. Her research concerns development, health, and environmental issues in rural China. She recently published a special issue of the journal The China Quarterly titled “Dying for Development: Pollution, Illness and the Limits of Citizens’ Agency in China” (2013) and a monograph, Fighting for Breath: Living Morally and Dying of Cancer in a Chinese Village.

Olivia Marcus received her MPH from Columbia University and is currently working toward a PhD in applied medical anthropology at the University of Connecticut. She has done extensive work concerning HIV prevention, health-seeking behavior among people living with HIV/AIDS, and sexual health promotion. She is concerned with sustainable intervention design. Her current fieldwork for her doctoral dissertation concerns healing practices in the Peruvian Amazon and the implications of health syncretism and medical pluralism on tourism and rights to intangible heritage.

Megan Mauger is a graduate of the University of Delaware, where she majored in environmental science within the College of Earth, Ocean, and the Environment and completed minors in anthropology and environmental humanities. Megan has a variety of experiences volunteering on organic farms, relating sustainable agriculture to watershed management, and working with environmental outreach and advocacy groups.

Amy McLennan is a postdoctoral associate at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford. She has a BMedSci from Flinders University, a BSc(Hons) in Anatomical Sciences from the University of Adelaide, and MPhil and DPhil degrees in Medical Anthropology from the University of Oxford. Her doctoral research was based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Republic of Nauru. She investigated historical and contemporary political ecological changes, local sociocultural changes, and the iterative links between these, changing food practices, and obesity emergence in the small Pacific island nation. She is currently involved in interdisciplinary research projects focusing on the social, political, and historical aspects of food and nutrition, diet-related noncommunicable diseases, and health governance.

Melissa K. Melby is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Delaware, with a joint appointment in Behavioral Health and Nutrition. She holds degrees in chemistry, environment and development, and anthropology, and spent over 10 years conducting research on menopause and soy, developmental origins of childhood obesity, and cultural consensus analysis of dietary problems in Japan. Research interests include how biophysical and sociocultural environmental factors influence human health.

Ivo Ngade, PhD is currently an Andrew Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology, Rhodes University in South Africa. After receiving a Master of Cultures and Development Studies (Anthropology) and the Certificate of Advanced Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Leuven University, he received a PhD from the Department of African Languages and Cultures at Ghent University (Belgium) in 2014. His research domains include HIV-related sexual risk behaviors among youth, technology usage and social relationships, transactional sex, youth culture, and transnational migration. Currently, he is working on local responses to fear of emergent infectious diseases, especially Ebola, in Cameroon.

Anja Olsen has an MSc in nutrition and a PhD in cancer epidemiology. She has worked within nutritional epidemiology since 2000 and is author and coauthor of more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific articles. Her primary focus has been on cohort studies (the Diet, Cancer and Health cohort and the European Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition) where she has studied associations between dietary habits (wholegrain, fruits and vegetables, alcohol, meat) and cancer incidence. She has a special interest in biomarker studies, including studies on hormonal factors (enterolactone and estrogen metabolites), studies on biomarkers of wholegrain intake (alkylresorcinols), and substances with potential negative effects (acrylamide). She is affiliated as senior researcher at the Danish Cancer Society Research Center.

Anne Marie Rieffestahl has an MSc in anthropology from the University of Copenhagen. She also holds an MSN degree in nursing and has extensive international experience in health work with Médicins sans Frontières. In her recent research, she has been part of a multidisciplinary Nordic collaboration investigating health effects of whole grains, especially in relation to noncommunicable diseases. Her primary focus has been on the agency regarding food habits and health among different groups of people in the Nordic countries. A number of publications are forthcoming on these topics. She is affiliated as project manager at the Centre for Clinical Education, the Capital Region of Copenhagen.

Melanie Rock is an anthropologist and social worker whose research program focuses on the implications for public health, public policy, and mental health promotion arising from human coexistence with nonhuman animals, especially companion animals or pets. Melanie is based at the University of Calgary, Canada, where she holds appointments in the Faculty of Medicine (Department of Community Health Sciences), the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (Department of Ecosystem and Public Health), the Faculty of Social Work, and the Faculty of Arts (Department of Anthropology). Also at the University of Calgary, she co-directs the Population Health & Inequities Research Centre within the Institute for Public Health.

Gabriela M. Sheets is a PhD candidate at Emory University and her dissertation focuses on the microbial ecology of early childhood in semi-rural El Salvador. Funding from the US Fulbright Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Earth Microbiome Project has supported her longitudinal study, which investigates the ecological, cultural, and political economic forces that shape the early development of the infant gut microbiome. Gabriela also teaches courses at Emory that creatively engage intersections of sustainability, development, microbiology, epigenetics, and human health. George Armelagos was her childhood hero and she is honored to have her name next to his.

Merrill Singer, PhD, a medical and cultural anthropologist, is a professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Community Medicine at the University of Connecticut. The central focus of his work is the social origins and maintenance of health inequality. Over his career, his research and writing have addressed HIV/AIDS in highly vulnerable and disadvantaged populations, illicit drug use and drinking behavior, community and structural violence, and the political ecology of health including the health consequences of climate change. His current research focuses on community health impacts of climate change and epidemics of fear in response to infectious disease. Dr. Singer has published over 275 journal articles and book chapters, and with this volume has authored or edited 30 books. He is a recipient of the Rudolph Virchow Professional Prize, the George Foster Memorial Award for Practicing Anthropology, the AIDS and Anthropology Paper Prize, the Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America, the Solon T. Kimball Award for Public and Applied Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association, and the AIDS and Anthropology Research Group’s Distinguished Service Award.

Eleanor S. Stephenson (BA Victoria, MSc Oxford) is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at McGill University, Montreal, Canada with research interests in environmental justice and governance. Her doctoral work focuses on nonrenewable resource development in the Eastern Canadian Arctic. Her past research has addressed environmental change and food security in Western Nepal; shale gas development in Western Canada, published in Energy Policy, Canadian Political Science Review, and Sustainability; and environmental change in circumpolar and upland regions, published in WIREs, Climate Change, Regional Environmental Change, and Climatic Change.

Peter H. Stephenson (BA Arizona, MA Calgary, PhD Toronto) is emeritus professor of anthropology and in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. He is a founding fellow of the Canadian Anthropology Society and recipient of the Weaver Tremblay award for applied Canadian anthropology. He has done research, especially among “vulnerable” populations including Vietnamese refugees, First Nations, frail seniors and Hutterites in Canada and among migrants and seniors in the Netherlands. His major publications include The Hutterian People (1991), A Persistent Spirit: Towards Understanding Aboriginal Health in British Columbia (1995), Zombie Factory: Culture, Stress & Sudden Death (with M. Korovkin, 2010), and Contesting Aging and Loss (with J. Graham, 2010), and many journal articles and book chapters.

Stanley Ulijaszek is professor of human ecology and director of the Unit for Biocultural Variation and Obesity at the University of Oxford, and vice-master of St Cross College Oxford. He graduated from the University of Manchester in Biochemistry, and took his PhD at the University of London (King’s College). His work on nutritional ecology and anthropology has involved fieldwork and research in Papua New Guinea, the Cook Islands, and South Asia. He presently conducts multidisciplinary research into the political ecology of obesity globally, using anthropological, public health, epidemiological, political, and economic historical frameworks.

Linda M. Whiteford is a medical anthropologist and professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida, She has degrees in anthropology and public health and is an internationally recognized researcher, lecturer, and author who consults for the World Bank, WHO, and PAHO. Her recent books include Global Health in Times of Violence, Primary Health Care in Cuba: The Other Revolution, Anthropological Ethics for Research and Practice, and Globalization, Water and Health: Resource Management in Times of Scarcity.

Rebecca K. Zarger is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. Her research focuses on human–environment relationships and has been funded by the US National Science Foundation, Inter-American Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. Dr. Zarger is coeditor-in-chief of the Journal of Ecological Anthropology, coeditor of the book Ethnobiology and Biocultural Diversity, and has published in Current Anthropology, Ecology and Society, Annals of Anthropological Practice, and Landscape and Urban Planning.