April 21, 2022

Dennis Wiedman and Iveris Martinez

Anthropologists have been employed in medical schools since the 1890s. Dennis Wiedman will discuss how and why our roles changed since then and have become more mainstreamed in medical schools and curriculums today. Wiedman discusses how his vision of a new type of medical school with a focus on community-care led to the founding of the Florida International University Wertheim College of Medicine, where anthropologist Iveris Martinez established the Society and Medicine curriculum.  They discuss topics such as, how anthropology programs can better prepare students for medical school roles; translating anthropological theory, methods, and knowledge to clinical case studies; addressing health disparities and sociocultural determinants of health; navigating the culture of medicine and the culture of anthropology; status gaps and maintaining an anthropology identity. This ASA presentation aims to stimulate our senior anthropologist colleagues to reflect and discuss these applied and practicing aspects of anthropology.

Dennis Wiedman is Professor of Anthropology, Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies, Florida International University (FIU), Miami, Florida. He is the Founding Director of the FIU Global Indigenous Forum whose mission it is to bring the Indigenous voice to FIU, South Florida, and the World.  His research interests include Native North Americans, global Indigenous health and wellbeing. He specializes in social and cultural factors for the global pandemic of Type II diabetes, and the metabolic syndrome. During more than a decade in the FIU Provost Office he was the University SACS Accreditation Officer and first Director of Program Review. He has served on the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in the practicing/professional seat and is a Past-President of the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA).

Iveris Martinez is Professor of the Archstone Foundation Endowed Chair in Gerontology, and Director of the Center for Successful Aging at California State University, Long Beach. Dr. Martinez was a founding faculty member of the Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine (HWCOM) at Florida International University, where she served as chief of the Division of Medicine & Society and chaired the admissions committee for the college for five years. An applied anthropologist, she has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, the MacArthur Foundation, among other sources for her community-based research on social and cultural factors influencing health, with an emphasis in aging, Latinos, and minority populations. She previously served as the Chair of the Board of the Alliance for Aging, Inc., the local area agency on aging for Miami-Dade and Monroe Counties, and President of the Association for Anthropology, Gerontology, and the Life Course. She received a joint PhD in Anthropology and Population & Family Health Sciences (Public Health) from Johns Hopkins University.