Ryan Whitacre PhD
UC Berkeley, Lecturer, Medical Anthropology
UCSF, Postdoctoral Fellow, AIDS Prevention Studies
Dr. Whitacre specializes in critical approaches to social and structural determinants of health, pharmaceutical access, substance use, and community engagement. He earned a PhD in the UCSF-UC Berkeley joint program in medical anthropology (2018) and completed postdoctoral training in global health at The Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland (2018-22). He authored the first dissertation in medical anthropology exploring how the development and implementation of novel biomedical methods to prevent HIV impacted the intimate lives of marginalized populations in the United States: “Intimate Innovation: A Novel Method to Prevent HIV” (University of California, 2018).
Dr. Whitacre has published in leading academic journals, including AIDS and Behavior (2020); Global Public Health (2019, 2021); HIV Medicine (2023); Journal of the International AIDS Society (2020); the Journal of Refugee Studies (2024) Medicine, Anthropology, Theory (2021); and Social Science and Medicine (2024). He has contributed to two edited books: Remaking HIV Prevention in the 21st Century (Bernays et al., 2021); and Technologies of Reproduction Across the Lifecourse (Boydell & Dow, 2022). He has also collaborated with global research teams to improve novel methods for HIV prevention and reduce the negative impacts of financialization on global public health. You can find this work on his Google Scholar page https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=HugKSc8AAAAJ&hl=en