Melissa Parker

Melissa Parker is a member of the Department of Global Health and Development at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and a Visiting Professor at the Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa. Her research builds on a multi-disciplinary training in Human Sciences and a DPhil (which combined methods and approaches current in social and biological anthropology) from Oxford University. Research questions typically emerge from extensive periods of ethnographic fieldwork, and engage with contemporary ideas in social, medical and political anthropology. Where appropriate, findings are used to both critique and enhance public health policies and practice. Topics investigated include: epidemic preparedness and response; mental health and healing in war zones; social and political legacies of mass forced displacement; medical humanitarianism, and biosocial approaches to the control of neglected tropical diseases in Sudan, Uganda and Tanzania.

In 2014, Melissa established the Ebola Response Anthropology Platform with colleagues from Sierra Leone and the UK. This proved a useful model for enabling expertise across the social sciences to usefully inform the delivery of humanitarian assistance, and the Platform now engages with a broader range of issues through the Social Science in Humanitarian Action Platform. In 2020 and 2021, she contributed to the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours and the ethnicity subgroup of SAGE.