MENTAL HEALTH, MEDICALIZATION, SUBJECTIVITY, HEALTH POLICY, COMPARATIVE CULTURAL CRITIQUE OF BIOMEDICAL PARADIGMS. 

Ph.D. 2010, History and Anthropology of Science, Technology and Society (HASTS) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA



Winner of 2011 Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award in Social Sciences, Middle Eastern Studies Association (MESA)  

Received Honorable Mention for 2011 Best Dissertation Award, Foundation for Iranian Studies 

Research Fellow, 2002-2005, Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Oxford, U.K. 

M.D., 2002, Tehran University, Iran 

Dr. Behrouzan is an Assistant Professor in medical anthropology at the UTMB Institute for the Medical Humanities. Her research focuses on global and cross-cultural psychiatry, mental health, trauma and subjectivity, HIV-AIDS and comparative cultural analysis of medical and professional cultures. Using both anthropology and Science Technology Studies (STS) as conceptual frameworks, she has combined  multi-sited and cross-national ethnography with discourse analysis, with a special focus on the blogosphere in the Middle East as highly affective sites for digital and social immersion and reconstruction of memory. Dr Behrouzan received her PhD from MIT in History and Anthropology of Science, Technology and Society (HASTS), where she concentrated on historical and social analysis of biosciences and biotechnologies, interdisciplinary analysis of psychiatric and neuroscientific subjectivities, as well as history and anthropology of the Middle East. Dr. Behrouzan’s research has received support from the the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the European Neuroscience and Society Network (ENSN) Award from the European Science Foundation (ESF).  Currently, she is working on the manuscript of her first monograph, Prozàk Diaries, based on her award winning doctoral dissertation, for which she recently received the annual Institute for Medical Humanities Diebel Monograph Fund award.

 At the IMH, Dr Behrouzan is part of a cohort of social scientists involved in the creation and design of a new track in social medicine and medical anthropology. She teaches graduate-level courses including Introduction to Medical Anthropology, History and Anthropology of Psychiatry, Social Theory and Anthropological Research Methods with a Cross-Cultural focus on the Middle East.  

Prior to coming to the United States in 2005, Behrouzan was a graduate student and research scholar in the Department of Clinical Medicine at University of Oxford, UK, where she studied molecular genetics at the Botnar Centre for Musculoskeletal Research (2002-2005). Prior to that, she worked as a physician and researcher at Tehran University.  

Dr. Behrouzan is fluent in English and French (as well as her native Persian), and competent in Spanish and classic Arabic.