I am an Associate Professor in the School of Nursing and Health Studies at the University of Washington Bothell. At the UW, I hold graduate faculty status, am affiliated with the UW African Studies Program, and am an adjunct faculty member of the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Global Health. At UW Bothell, I teach courses in global health, public health, and nursing.

I completed my PhD in Sociomedical Sciences from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. My doctoral work was sponsored by grants from the National Science Foundation (Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant – Law and Social Sciences), the American Association of University Women (American Fellowship), the US Fulbright / IIE Program, and the National Institutes of Health (Gender, Sexuality and Health Training Grant). While at Columbia, I was a teaching fellow in the Undergraduate Writing Program and a research fellow in the Columbia Population Research Center.

Prior to beginning my graduate work, I worked with Mothers2Mothers, a program supporting community-based, peer-to-peer prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV in South Africa. I received my BA in Political Science from Williams College.

My work focuses on questions of how politics and policy relate to population health, in both global and domestic contexts. My first book, Mistreated, looks at the political ramifications of HIV treatment in the southern African country of Lesotho. I have co-edited two other books, one on corporations and global health, and another on the politics of HIV treatment roll-out. More about these books here. For information on my more recent work on medical and global health crowdfunding, visit this page.

My work has appeared in PLOS One, Social Science and Medicine, Globalization & Health, Sociology of Health and Illness, Global Public Health, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Medicine Anthropology Theory, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Public Health Ethics, Developing World Bioethics, and Human Organization. I am the recipient of the Stephen Polgar Professional Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology, and the Rudolf Virchow Award from the Critical Anthropology of Global Health group, both prestigious prizes for published articles. My book was awarded the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Prize by Vanderbilt University Press.

You can find me on Twitter @NJKenworthy, and on Mastodon @Kenworthy@Mastodon.online

Contact me