Prof. Lenore Manderson

Professor Lenore Manderson AM is Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology in the School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, prior to which she held chairs at the University of Queensland (1988-98), Melbourne (1999-2005), and Monash (2006-2013).

Lenore was awarded an inaugural Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship in 2001, which she held at Melbourne and Monash, was elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 1995; Fellow, World Academy of Art and Science, in 2004; and member of the Academy of Science of South Africa in 2016. In 2016, she received an A rating by the National Research Foundation of South Africa as a leading international researcher.

Through her work in medical anthropology, social history and public health, she has played a lead role in training and research in inequality and social exclusion, the social determinants of infectious and chronic disease, gender and sexuality, immigration and ethnicity in Australia, Southeast and East Asia (Malaysia, China, Thailand, the Philippines and Japan) the Solomon Islands, South Africa and Ghana. Her work with Indigenous and immigrants Australians, and in infectious disease, is largely applied; this includes developing guidelines for practice to enhance access to services and to provide cultural appropriate services.

Lenore has published some 750 books, articles, book chapters, and reports in these and other areas, including Surface Tensions (2011), Connected Lives (edited with Nolwazi Mkhwanazi, 2020), and Viral Loads: Anthropologies of Urgency in the time of COVID-19 (edited with Nancy J.Burke and Ayo Wahlberg, 2021).

For the past 33 years, she has worked in advisory capacity with WHO and other multilateral agency committees, particularly with TDR (Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases); she chairs the External Review Group of the Social Innovations in Health Initiative of TDR.

She has trained to completion some 170 students, many conducting research in and nationals from resource-limited settings. Her move in 2014 from Australia to South Africa allows her to concentrate on build and sustain multidisciplinary research capacity in public and population health on the continent, and to focus on health conditions of especially vulnerable populations.

Lenore was awarded the Society of Medical Anthropology Career Achievement Award in 2016, and in January 2020, she was admitted as a Member of the Order of Australia.