Thurka Sangaramoorthy is a Professor of Anthropology at American University. She is a cultural anthropologist with expertise in medical anthropology and epidemiology. Her research focuses on improving care for those living with HIV, developing more effective care systems for non-citizen immigrants, amplifying local community expertise as a transformative tool for enacting policies and practices that effectively address disparate environmental risks in communities of color, and advocating for social justice. Her writings on these topics appear in a wide range of scholarly and mainstream publications. She is also the author of Rapid Ethnographic Assessments: A Practical Approach and Toolkit for Collaborative Community Research with Karen Kroeger (Routledge, 2020) and Treating AIDS: Politics of Difference, Paradox of Prevention (Rutgers University Press, 2014). 

Her current book projects examine the health and well-being of immigrants and temporary migrants in rural contexts, and explore oral history narratives of older Black women living and aging with HIV. 

She teaches on the topics of medical and cultural anthropology, global health and development, and social studies of science. With 22 years of expertise in conducting applied ethnographic research, including rapid assessments, among vulnerable populations in the United States, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, she offers training to those who are interested in ethnographic and qualitative research methods. 

Thurka received her BA in Anthropology and Biology from Barnard College (1998), and earned her MPH in Sociomedical Sciences Research and Epidemiology from Columbia University (2002) and her PhD in Medical Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco (2008).

Abbreviated curriculum vita