Alexandra Brewis

Alexandra Brewis (Slade)*, Ph.D., is a biocultural anthropologist and Regent's Professor & President’s Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. She is currently senior editor (Medical Anthropology) for Social Science and Medicine, and previously served as President of the Human Biology Association. As an ASU administrator, she founded the Center for Global Health in 2006, served as Director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change (2010-2017), and as ASU's Associate Vice President for Social Sciences (2014-2017). 

Current research efforts are focused on understanding the dynamics and consequences of moralized classifications like "fat," "dirty," "diseased," or "weed." This has two main lines of inquiry:

• Understanding how people are using the new GLP-1 RA "weight loss drugs" (like Ozempic and Wegovy), their complex links to social acceptance versus stigma, and how this is redefining which bodies are defined as "normal" and "healthy" or not.
• Using the case of human and "weed" interactions to understand how the cultural classfication of plants shapes both biologies. 

Trained in human biology, demography, and medical anthropology, she has typically worked in large, diverse, collaborative teams – including academics in other fields, local communities, and institutions like hospitals or NGOs. Brewis' field-based research projects have been based in many parts of the globe, including the island Pacific and the Americas.

Her research program has produced 8 authored books, 5 edited volumes, and ~250 journal articles. One recent book is the prize-winning Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting: Stigma and the Undoing of Global Health, described in reviews as a "boundary-breaking." Recognitions include election as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Conrad M. Arensberg Award of the American Anthropological Association honoring an individual who has furthered anthropology as a natural science, and the Franz Boas Distinguished Achievement Award of the Human Biology Association.

*Alex prefers to go professionally by Alexandra Brewis, but her legal name is Alexandra Slade. Various hiccups in techno-bureaucracy means her name turns up in different systems as Brewis, Brewis Slade (no hyphen), Brewis-Slade (hyphen), and Slade. She happily answers to them all.