Adriana Petryna: Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professorship in Anthropology
Dr. Petryna is the undergraduate chair of the department of anthropology, a faculty forum member in the Penn Institute for Urban Research and an associate at Penn’s Center for Bioethics. She received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and came to Penn in 2006 from the New School for Social Research.
She is the author of Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl (Princeton University Press, 2002), which won the New Millennium Book Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology, as well as the Sharon Stephens First Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society. Her latest work, When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects (Princeton University Press, 2009), explores patient protections in the context of global clinical trials. She was also the co-editor of Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices (Duke University Press, 2006).
The Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professorship in Anthropology was established through a bequest by Mr. and Mrs. Kahn. Mr. Kahn was a 1925 Wharton graduate who had a highly successful career in the oil and natural gas industry. His wife, a graduate of Smith College, worked for Newsweek and owned an interior design firm. The couple supported many programs and projects at the University including Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, the Modern Languages College House, and other initiatives in scholarship and the humanities
