Barbara Herr Harthorn

Barbara Herr Harthorn, Principal Investigator and Director of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center: Center for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS) at University of California at Santa Barbara, is also Associate Professor of Women's Studies, and Co-Director of the Center for Global Studies in the Institute for Social, Behavioral and Economic Research. Her research examines the social production of health inequality, and in particular looks at the intersections of gender, ethnicity/race, and transnational migration in health and health risk perception. Her current work examines technological risk perception among diverse US and comparative UK populations. She was a member of the Executive Committee of the National Science Foundation Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science and leads an international network on health risk perception and spatial analysis. She has conducted research in East Africa, Polynesia, Melanesia, and urban and rural California. She is author (with Laury Oaks) of Risk, Culture, and Health Inequality: Shifting Perceptions of Danger and Blame (2003) and has published in a variety of social science, medical care, and public health journals. She has a doctorate in medical anthropology and transcultural psychiatry from UCLA and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Bryn Mawr College; she also completed postdoctoral research in social psychology at UCSB.