Director

Janis H. Jenkins

PhD, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry, Director, Center for Global Mental Health, Advisory Board for Global Health Program, President, American Anthropological Association, Society for Psychological Anthropology (November 2023-November 2025)

Dr. Janis Hunter Jenkins is a psychological/medical anthropologist. She received her PhD from UCLA and post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School. She has been Principal Investigator for research on culture and mental health among adults and children, in socioeconomically disadvantaged regions for Mexican, Salvadoran, and Puerto Rican, Latinx, Hispano, and First Nation populations in North and Central America. She leads research and intervention teams concerned with social and cultural processes that improve or exacerbate the course and outcome of illness, migrant health and sites of care in Mexico and the U.S. border region, and the central role of struggle in processes of living with conditions of mental illness and inequity as pressing matters of fundamental human rights and social justice.