Biography

Dr. Erikson is an SFU Distinguished Professor who studies highly complex political economies that shape human health. Her new book, Investable! When Pandemic Risk meets Speculative Finance – A Cautionary Tale (MIT Press, 2025), which she traveled over 420,000 research kilometres to write, is about the financialization of global health and capitalist speculation repurposed as save-the-world innovation. In earlier research, she anticipated the rise of global health data as a finance currency; the change of health data use, from accountability to invest-ability; and the failures of smartphone contact tracing apps during pandemics. Her current research analyzes the increasing datafication and financialization of health, focusing on how global investors use data, modeling, and fintech, including AI, to gamble on catastrophe risk. A committed teacher and mentor, Erikson promotes next-generation anthropological “being there” and “following the thing” methodologies as means for analyzing thorny health challenges.

An award-winning medical anthropologist, Dr. Erikson has worked in Africa, Europe, Central Asia, and North America. During an earlier international affairs career, she first worked in West Africa for two years before working in Washington, DC, on foreign policy and trade issues with government departments and international organizations. As an academic, she combines her professional non-academic experience with a critical study of global political economy of health. Her work has been published in Nature, The Lancet, BMJ, Medical Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Social Science & Medicine, Global Public Health, Critical Public Health, Anthropologica and others. Media quoting/citing her work include Nature, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg, Wired, IEEE Spectrum, Al Bawaba and others.

In 2007, Dr. Erikson joined the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University, where she was awarded the Graduate Teaching and Mentorship Excellence Award in 2012 and the Michael Hayes Award for Excellence in Teaching, Research and Service in 2020. In 2023, she was a Mellon Foundation Faculty Fellow at SFU’s renown Digital Democracies Institute, where she began a research project on the merging of A.I. and “natural assets” in planetary health pursuits. She is the founding director of the Global Health Affairs Program at the Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and was voted Best Professor there in 2004.

She won the 2013 Society for Medical Anthropology's (SMA) Virchow Prize for her publication, "Global Health Business: The Production and Performativity of Statistics in Germany and Sierra Leone" (in Medical Anthropology) and contributed chapters to edited volumes that won SMA's Basker Prize in 2012 (Reproduction, Globalization, and the State, eds. Carole Browner and Carolyn Sargent) and two SMA Council for the Anthropology of Reproduction book awards in 2006 (Barren States, ed. Carrie Douglass) and 2012 (Reproduction, Globalization, and the State).

Mid-career, Dr. Erikson was a Senior Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research think tank in Duisburg, Germany. In 2016, she was a Mercator Fellow with the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) project “Adaptation and Creativity in Africa: Technologies and Significations in the Production of Order and Disorder” at the Universities of Leipzig and Halle, Germany. In 2020, she joined a Norwegian Research Council research team for the project, “The Smartphone Pandemic: Mobil Technologies and Data in the COVID-19 Response,” and was an advisory board member of the “Pandemic Preparedness Project”, a Wellcome Trust project at the University of Sussex, and is a member of the Law, Organization, Science and Technology Research Network out of Berlin, Germany. Since 2019, she has served as an Associate Editor of Medical Anthropology.

Dr. Erikson’s research has been funded by the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the Mellon Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Norwegian Research Council, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), the Institute for International Education (IIE), Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), and others. Postdoctoral work was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She partnered with FHS colleagues to receive funding from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) for research collaboration on corporate and privatizing trends in global public health.

Dr. Erikson has a passionate interest in deepening understanding of anthropological method and its applications to all manner of planetary health. To that end, she is involved with several efforts to expand medical anthropology education and training beyond conventional curricula. She is a co-founder and current coordinator of the Cascadia Seminar, an ongoing bi-annual interactive forum for exploring cutting-edge work in medical anthropology. She has been a PI and/or coordinated medical anthropology workshop trainings, including a Volkswagen Foundation-sponsored workshop held in Freetown, Sierra Leone, working with Sierra Leonean and European graduate students exploring the use of critical medical anthropology theory and method to anticipate planetary futures. She is currently overseeing an international project with Sierra Leonean, North American, and European colleagues conducting a SSHRC-University of Manitoba-Seton Hall University-sponsored project, “Desirable/Undesirable Health Futures,” results of which will appear in a forthcoming Journal of Critical Public Health special issue in 2026. 

Research Interests

Financialization, datafication, and the global political economy of planetary health are Dr. Erikson's current research foci. She combines anthropological theory and ethnographic method with Science and Technology Studies (STS) to study the multiple meanings of “investment” in health, local health sovereignty, and the uneven expressions, logics, and governmentalities of human health and well-being.

Dr. Erikson’s research in Germany and Sierra Leone provides a valuable standpoint for analyses of how global relations of power shape human health and wellbeing. In a 2008 Lancet invited commentary, “Getting Political: Fighting Smarter for Global Health,” she argued for greater attention to be paid to the politics of global health. Cultivating health partisans willing to ‘get political’ to reduce suffering originating in economic and policy architectures is a key starting point. In a chapter, “Global Ethnography: Problems of Theory and Method” in Reproduction, Globalization and the State (2011), she outlines a methodological approach applicable for ethnographic evidence-based means to assess what actually works to reduce human suffering. The methodology can also help identify political practices that, however unintentionally, hurt people.

Over the last decade, Dr. Erikson has conducted research in Sierra Leone and world cities on the production, use and global circulation of health data in new forms of global health finance. She was in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in February 2014 leading a research team studying local and global data use when news of Ebola infections in neighboring Guinea first reached the capital city (see Tett’s Anthro-Vision, Ch 3). Findings from that research – that health data is used not only for accountability, but also increasingly for invest-ability – led to a research project on how health data is curated for use in investment instruments. Her analyses cautioned that data imperatives restructure health sector capital, labour, and priority-setting, with uneven, unfair, and sometimes deleterious effects on population health.

2025 brought earth-shattering political changes to global health, ones that can be expected, based on decades of social science research, to result in an increase in human suffering and death. Dr. Erikson joins others in research and writing about emergency efforts to both ameliorate the immediate suffering the new policies inflict, as well as to continue contributing progressive longer-term envisioning of health for all, starting with the shoring up of universal primary care, an essential still-unrealized goal for the health of everyone on the planet.  

Supervisory Topics

(Dr. Erikson is not currently accepting new students.)

Dr. Erikson works with students interested in using anthropological methodological and analytical tools to increase critical knowledge for reducing human suffering. She teaches that “global health” is not simplistically silo-ed in poor countries, but rather is a worldwide social field within which local health likelihoods are constituted through political and economic ideologies and relations of power. Students currently working with her are studying: heat metrics in maternal and infant care; health data collection in polio eradication; seed sovereignty; and tobacco medicine.

Publications

Susan Erikson's publications