Anne E. Becker, MD, PhD, SM
Anne E. Becker is the Maude and Lillian Presley Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where she is Vice Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and directs the Social Sciences MD-PhD Program. An anthropologist and psychiatrist, Dr. Becker studies the impact of social and cultural environment on mental health. Her book, Body, Self, and Society: The View from Fiji, probes the cultural mediation of self-agency and body experience and her NIMH-funded research has investigated the impact of rapid social change on eating pathology and other youth health risk behaviors in Fiji. Dr. Becker now co-leads a project — also funded by the NIMH — with Pere Eddy Eustache, who is Director of Mental Health and Psychosocial Services at Zanmi Lasante. They and theirHaiti- and US-based collaborators are developing, implementing, and pilot testing a school-based program in Haiti’s Central Plateau that will train educators to help secondary school students with depression and other mental health risk in navigating local mental health services and supports. Dr. Becker recently concluded her service as a member of the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-5 Eating Disorders Work Group and as Past President of the Academy for Eating Disorders. She is former co-editor in chief of Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, and presently serves on the editorial boards of Anthropology & Medicine, the Harvard Review of Psychiatry, and the International Journal of Eating Disorders; at the latter she is an associate editor and oversees global initiatives.