I am a cultural and applied anthropologist whose teaching, applied work, and scholarship share a concern with human wellbeing and with how knowledge, professional practice, and cultural values can alleviate or contribute to suffering.
As a Professor of Practice in the W. A. Franke Honors College, I direct and teach in the Health and Human Values minor, working with honors students preparing for careers in medicine and other health professions to understand the social, cultural, historical, and human dimensions of health, illness, disability, and care. I have also developed interdisciplinary General Education courses that introduce STEM students to anthropological and historical approaches to science, technology, medicine, surveillance, and the politics of nature.

My applied work has included research at the UNC School of Medicine supporting the rollout of telemedicine in ways responsive to children with disabilities and their families; consulting with El Rio Community Health Center to help align management practices with the needs of staff and patients; and collaborating with the Tucson Police Department to support the implementation of evidence-based policing practices.

A throughline in my scholarship is how inequality and marginality become resources for medical and technological innovation—and who benefits. My research on telemedicine demonstration projects in the late 1990s and early 2000s examined how rural and Indigenous communities with limited access to specialist care became valuable sites for demonstrating the possibilities of the emerging Internet. Their remoteness and lack of access could be used to showcase new technologies while advancing the professional and institutional interests of medical specialists, hospitals, and academic medical centers. My archival and oral-historical research on a 1970s collaboration among the Tohono O’odham Nation, NASA, Lockheed, and the Indian Health Service similarly examined how efforts to improve reservation health care intersected with Indigenous self-determination, health-policy reform, and aerospace and defense interests seeking new technological applications and markets.

My teaching has been recognized by the Five-Star Teaching Award, for which I have been a finalist and semi-finalist, and my scholarship on the history of telemedicine and the Tohono O'odham Nation received the History of Science Society’s 2022 Price/Webster Prize.

Greene, J. A., Braitberg, V., & Bernadett, G. M. (2020). Innovation on the Reservation: Information Technology and Health Systems Research among the Papago Tribe of Arizona, 1965–1980. Isis, 111(3), 443-470.

200 Cultural Anthropology

444 Introduction to Medical Anthropology

311 Urban Anthropology

310 Culture and the Individual

571B Applied Medical Anthropology in Western Contexts

599 Independent Study

696B Anthropology of Science

Southern US
Southwest US
North America (general)

Medical Anthropology; Science and Technology Studies; Digital Media; Surveillance and Privacy; History of Medicine in the United States and France; French Social and Cultural Theory; Critical Studies of Telehealth and Telemedicine; Social Inequality and Marginality; Health-Medical and Criminal-Legal Institutions; Policing, Race, and Systemic Racism; Honors undergraduate education; Academic capitalism