Things I've Learned with Professor Clara Han
Extremely personable and willing to talk with her students, Professor Clara Han was more than willing to sit down with The News-Letter to talk about her work and research experiences:
I went to Harvard; had a Fulbright [Scholarship] after graduation from Princeton, where I ended up working on, basically, looking at the issue of street children in Nairobi in relation to the burgeoning HIV epidemic with the very little treatment options that were available at the time. I was working on that issue.
And then I moved back to Harvard where I started graduate school in medical anthropology and also I started a medical degree and went to medical school for four years. So it turned into a nine year project.
I actually started to get interested in medical anthropology as an undergrad. I took a course freshman year - Intro to med. Anthro. It was probably one of the most amazing courses I've taken in my life. It completely changed the way I saw health and illness and different kinds of interventions. My interest in med anthropology was to understand how larger questions of political violence and economy get woven into everyday life, and also how the medical discipline and public health discipline seeks to help address those issues.
There are crossovers [between social medicine and public health or medical anthropology] - it's hard to define boundaries. There's a certain social medicine perspective at Harvard; historical perspective and better health delivery systems to people so that they can have the treatment that is available in other places. How is it that you can get pharmeceuticals to everyone in the populations - it is very public health oriented … these lines are getting increasingly blurred.
So I actually work in Santiago Chile. I still work there; I imagine that I'll be working there for a really long time. I got interested in working there because a colleague of mine invited me to work on a project with him on post traumatic stress disorder, in terms of political violence and how communities have had post traumatic stress disorder from political violence. I went to Peru first. [I was] Feeling profoundly uncomfortable with how this kind of discourse of post traumatic stress disorder was framing the communities devastated by political violence.
I went to Harvard; had a Fulbright [Scholarship] after graduation from Princeton, where I ended up working on, basically, looking at the issue of street children in Nairobi in relation to the burgeoning HIV epidemic with the very little treatment options that were available at the time. I was working on that issue.
And then I moved back to Harvard where I started graduate school in medical anthropology and also I started a medical degree and went to medical school for four years. So it turned into a nine year project.
I actually started to get interested in medical anthropology as an undergrad. I took a course freshman year - Intro to med. Anthro. It was probably one of the most amazing courses I've taken in my life. It completely changed the way I saw health and illness and different kinds of interventions. My interest in med anthropology was to understand how larger questions of political violence and economy get woven into everyday life, and also how the medical discipline and public health discipline seeks to help address those issues.
There are crossovers [between social medicine and public health or medical anthropology] - it's hard to define boundaries. There's a certain social medicine perspective at Harvard; historical perspective and better health delivery systems to people so that they can have the treatment that is available in other places. How is it that you can get pharmeceuticals to everyone in the populations - it is very public health oriented … these lines are getting increasingly blurred.
So I actually work in Santiago Chile. I still work there; I imagine that I'll be working there for a really long time. I got interested in working there because a colleague of mine invited me to work on a project with him on post traumatic stress disorder, in terms of political violence and how communities have had post traumatic stress disorder from political violence. I went to Peru first. [I was] Feeling profoundly uncomfortable with how this kind of discourse of post traumatic stress disorder was framing the communities devastated by political violence.
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