Hello!

I am a medical anthropologist specializing in global maternal and infant health, HIV, structural vulnerability, and health systems and policy research. My primary research interests include structural vulnerability and equity in access to maternal and infant health services in Tanzania and northwest Florida. In Tanzania, I focused on how volatility in donor and health policy affected the health and well-being of HIV+ women and children living in poverty. In the US, I focus primarily on women’s, maternal, and infant health inequities, exploring how local networks of community workers can improve health systems to reduce social and structural barriers to good health.

I am an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of West Florida. I received a MPH in International Health & Development from Tulane University in 2008, and completed my PhD in Medical Anthropology from the University of Florida in 2014.

I’m currently working on two projects. The first addresses the social and structural determinants of health and infant mortality with colleagues at the Escambia County Healthy Start Coalition, and the second analyzes skeletal and dental biomarkers of marginalization with biocultural colleagues at UWF. For the first project, my local Healthy Start colleagues and I use our years of experience as case reviewers on our county’s Fetal and Infant Mortality Review (FIMR) to propose a Structural Vulnerability Assessment Tool for FIMR teams, to better address the patterned forms of social marginalization and poor health we have seen in the cases we review. For the second project, my UWF biological anthropology colleagues and I developed what we call a Structural Vulnerability Profile (SVP) that is intended to guide scholars and professionals who work with skeletal and dental tissues to identify potential markers of social marginalization among contemporary populations. Using CT scans from the New Mexico Decent Image Database, we published the proposed SVP in Forensic Sciences International: Synergy. Our article “What Makes a ‘Good’ Forensic Anthropologist?” in part analyzed some related ethical and theoretical issues of advocacy in forensics, and was published in the September 2023 issue of American Anthropologist. The next stages of SVP research will include mixed methods ethnographic research of ante-mortem tooth loss in the U.S. and Senegal.

Please visit the research and publications pages to learn more about my current research projects and my previous work, as well as the teaching page to see how I use these experiences to inform my pedagogy and mentorship of undergraduate and graduate students. Finally, if you have any questions, or are interested in pursuing graduate studies at UWF, please email me at mmarten@uwf.edu.