Organizing Team
University of California, San Francisco; University of California, Davis; and University of California, Berkeley students organizing the 2026 SHSSM Conference
Sam Aptekar
Sam is a fifth-year MD–PhD student in Medical Anthropology at UCSF and UC Berkeley. His research in Iquitos, Peru examines public health responses to dengue fever alongside the tourism economy surrounding ayahuasca. His interests include capitalism and aesthetics, biopolitics, Latin American social medicine, postcolonialism, critical global health, and historical methods.
Laura Chang
Laura Chang (she/they) is a second-year medical student in the UC Davis MD/PhD program in Anthropology. Her research is on Ecuador's national intercultural health policy and its local impacts, particularly in Cotacachi canton, Imbabura province. She works closely with the Kichwa midwives of the Consejo Indígena de Salud Ancestral Hampik Warmikuna. Laura is interested in Family Medicine and Obstetrics & Gynecology.
Katarina L. Cook
Katarina L. Cook (she/her) is a 2nd-year MD-PhD student in Transportation, Technology & Policy at UC Davis. She studies health equity at the intersection of transportation, injury prevention, and medicine, focusing on vulnerable road users and crash outcomes. Her research examines how substance use, built environment, and housing instability influence crash risk and victim outcomes, as well as the medico-legal complexities of hit-and-run incidents and the asymmetric dynamics between high-energy machines and the human body. She is interested in specializing in emergency medicine, occupational health, or physical medicine & rehabilitation.
Sadia Demby
Sadia Demby (she/her) is an MD-PhD candidate in Medical Anthropology at UCSF and UC Berkeley. She is interested in the study of people as infrastructure, notions and networks of care, and theory from the south. She conducts research on care-seeking behavior and city-making in Freetown, interrogating the turbulent and striking effects of (post)colonialism, urbanism, and resistance through life in Sierra Leone. Clinically, she is interested in internal medicine, emergency medicine, and psychiatry.
Jeremy A. Gottlieb
Jeremy A. Gottlieb (they/them) is a 7th-year MD-PhD candidate in Medical Anthropology at UCSF and UC-Berkeley. They study subjectification, affect, and changing conceptions of the human through ethnographic research on deep brain stimulation as a treatment for psychiatric illnesses. They have also published anthropological research into ontologies of gender through ethnographic research of pediatric transgender clinics, and gender and biomedicalization within direct-to-consumer men’s health companies.
Theo Michaels
Theo is an MD-PhD student in Medical Anthropology at UCSF and UC Berkeley. He is interested in questions of the far-right, labor, paranoia, surveillance capitalism, infrastructure, and migration. He has performed research on cultures of mourning on Reddit.com, conspiracy theorists in England, and crisis response services in California. For his PhD, Theo plans to drive a long-haul truck and research the public health and surveillance of truck drivers.
Sita Strother
Sita Strother (she/her) is a 1st-year MD-PhD student in Medical Anthropology at UCSF and UC-Berkeley. She is interested in Indigenizing medicine, traditional healing, and survivance among American Indian healthcare providers in substance use disorder treatment. Her previous research has been on historical trauma and resilience among American Indian and Jewish women, gender transformation and decolonization in global health, and Indigenous identity work. She has an interest in primary care specialties, oncology, psychiatry and medical education. She is on the board of the Human Rights Collaborative (asylum clinic), member of the Association of Native American Medical Students, and the Anti-Oppressive Curriculum Initiative at UCSF.
Athina vrosgou
Athina Vrosgou (she/her) is a fourth-year MD-PhD student in Medical Anthropology in the joint UCSF-UC Berkeley program. She is interested in intersubjectivity, conceptions of consciousness, ritual healing, and formulations of evidence and efficacy in neurocritical care settings and community healing spaces. Her past work includes an ethnographic study of a healing practice associated with the evil eye in Greece, qualitative global health research on barriers to post-stroke care, and clinical research on disorders of consciousness.
