Vinh-kim Nguyen

Biography

Vinh-Kim Nguyen is an HIV and Emergency physician and medical anthropologist. As both practitioner and researcher, he is concerned with the relationship between science, politics and practice in global health. He practices Emergency Medicine at Avicenna Hospital in Paris and the Jewish General Hospital in Montréal, currently holds an ERC Consolidator Grant (Research Chair) on the science and politics of a world without AIDS and heads a team of anthropologists researching the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. He is Professor in the School of Public Health the University of Montreal where he leads the PhD track in Global Health, and Professor of Anthropology and Sociology of Development in the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies in Geneva; he also holds an honorary chair at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris which hosts researchers working on global health issues.

Research Interest

Since 1994 he has worked extensively with community organisations responding to the HIV epidemic in West Africa as a trainer and physician. This work informed his anthropological research on the global response to HIV with a concern for the forms of triage and sovereignty they embody. He continues to follow the evolving scientific and political response to HIV and Ebola in his current work. He draws on molecular epidemiology, global health and social theory to argue for a paradigm shift in eliminating infectious diseases. He is the author of The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa's Time of AIDS; coauthor, with Margaret Lock, of An Anthropology of Biomedicine and also the co-editor, with Jennifer Klot, of The Fourth Wave: Violence, Gender, Culture, and HIV in the 21st Century, as well as numerous articles in biomedical and anthropological journals.