Prof Lenore Manderson joined the School of Public Health of the University of the Witwatersrand as a Distinguished Professor in 2014, after a decade as an Honorary Professor. She is also both an Honorary Professor, Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA and Adjunct Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University. At Wits, she is Responsible for the Postdoctoral Fellow and Emerging Researchers programme.
Prof Manderson was first appointed to a Full Professorial position in 1987, as Professor of Tropical Health, The University of Queensland, Australia, from 1988-1998. She was Professor of Women’s Health, University of Melbourne, 1999-2005, and Professor of Medical Anthropology at Monash University, 2006-2013. Prof Manderson held an inaugural Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship at Melbourne and Monash universities from 2002-2007.
She is internationally known for her work in anthropology, social history and public health. Prof Manderson has played a lead role in Training and Research in inequality, social exclusion and marginality, the social determinants of infectious and chronic disease, gender and sexuality, immigration and ethnicity in Australian, Asian and African settings.
At Wits, she Leads a programme of work around medical interventions, technology, access and equity, and on chronic care and aging in community settings. Prof Manderson has Trained to graduation some 150 higher degree students and is the Author, Co-Author or Editor of some 600 Books, Articles, Book Chapters and Reports, including Sickness and the State (1996), Surface Tensions: Surgery, Bodily Boundaries and the Social Self (2011), and the Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology (2016). Her most recent book, with Nolwazi Mkhwanazi, is Connected Lives: Families, households, health and care in contemporary South Africa and is published by HSRC Press. She Edits the international Journal Medical Anthropology.
Prof Manderson is a Member of the Scientific Working Group on Vectors, Environment and Society of the Tropical Disease Programme (TDR) (2015-2017); the Social Innovations in Health Initiative (2015+) of TDR; and the Scientific Working Group of the WHO Kobe Centre (SWG/WKC, 2017+).
She is an NRF A-rated Scientist and a Member of the Academy of Science of South Africa, and in 2016, was Awarded the Career Achievement Award by the Society of Medical Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association.
