The George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation

Project Title- COLOR OF OXYGEN: Redesign for a Hospitable Future

Bio:

Amy Moran-Thomas, PhD is Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT.  Her ethnographic research focuses on how health technologies and ecologies are designed and come to be materially embodied—often inequitably—by people in their ordinary lives. Prof. Moran-Thomas received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Princeton University in 2012. Her writings have appeared in publications such as New England Journal of Medicine and Wired.  Her first book, Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic (University of California Press, 2019), offers an anthropological account of diabetes care technologies in use and the lives they shape in global perspective. The book received an award from the caregivers in Belize whose work it describes, the Diabetes Foot Care Group with the Caribbean Diabetes Association, as well as the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and the Wellcome Medal for Anthropology as Applied to Medical Problems.  A current member of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on the Use of Race and Ethnicity in Biomedical Research, Prof. Moran-Thomas is interested in public anthropology, ethnographic writing, and how social perspectives on design can contribute to producing more equitable health technologies.  She is currently working on a book project about oxygen.