Phillippe Bourgois

Professor in Residence
Department: Anthropology
pbourgois@gmail.com
Website
Keywords: Medicine, AIDS, Urban Anthropology

Philippe was Professor and Chair of Anthropology at San Francisco State University in the 1990s and went on to found the Department of Social Medicine at UCSF from 1998 to 2005. He moved to the University of Pennsylvania as the Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology and Community Medicine. He started the formal MSTP MD/PhD tracks in Anthropology at both UCSF and the University of Pennsylvania. Philippe is currently working with Joel Braslow, the Director of UCLA’s MSTP track in the Social Sciences and the Coordinator of the Social Medicine and Humanities initiative in the David Geffen School of Medicine, to grow our increasingly vibrant intellectual community of Clinician-Social Scientists on campus. He is in the early stages of helping build an exciting consortium with the Social Science tracks of the MD/PhD programs at other UC campuses which we hope to eventually extend to other institutions across the country.

His fieldwork began in Central America in 1979 (Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Panama) documenting the revolutionary movements and political repression of the early to mid 1980s. Since 1985 his primary fieldwork has been in the US inner city (East Harlem crack sellers 1985-1981, San Francisco homeless injectors 1995-2007, Puerto Rican North Philadelphia heroin sellers 2007-2015 and Los Angeles indigent mental illness). He has been the Principal or Co-Investigator on dozens of National Institutes of Health grants since 1996.