University of New Mexico
Departments of Sociology and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy
1070 Social Sciences Building, MSC 05-3080
Albuquerque
NMUSA
87131
Biographical Sketch: Howard Waitzkin is Distinguished Professor, University of New Mexico. He received his PhD (sociology) and MD degrees from Harvard University and obtained his subsequent clinical training as a resident and fellow at Stanford University and Massachusetts General Hospital. His work has focused on health policy in comparative international perspective and on psychosocial issues in primary care. Throughout his career, he has advocated for improved health access; he coauthored the proposal for a single-payer national health program that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and later was introduced in the U.S. Congress. Dr. Waitzkin has received recognition as a Fulbright New Century Scholar, fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, recipient of the Leo G. Reeder Award of the American Sociological Association for Distinguished Scholarship in Medical Sociology (highest career achievement award in the social sciences pertinent to medicine), and recipient of the Jonathan Mann Award for Lifetime Commitment to Public Health and Social Justice Issues from the New Mexico Public Health Association. He is the author of five books, including Medicine and Public Health at the End of Empire, which will be published during early 2011, as well as more than 190 articles and chapters. At the University of New Mexico, he has taught courses on medical sociology, globalization and health, health communication, public mental health, comparative international health systems, social medicine in Latin America, and the first seminar in the new B.A.-M.D. Program (“Contours of Health in New Mexico”). For the past 10 years, he has directed the New Mexico Mentorship and Education Program in Mental Health Services Research, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. He also sees patients clinically as a primary care practitioner of internal medicine and geriatric medicine in rural northern New Mexico.