Dr Clare Chandler
BA MSc PhD
Professor
in Medical Anthropology
LSHTM
15-17 Tavistock Place
London
WC1H 9SH
United Kingdom
Clare Chandler (PhD) is a medical anthropologist who leads the Anthropology of Antimicrobial Resistance research group at the LSHTM, which aims to bring critical social scholarship to global health topics including AMR. She co-founded the LSHTM Antimicrobial Resistance Centre, which works to inspire innovation through interdisciplinary engagements. She is known for her anthropological work on medicines and health care in resource limited settings. Her research is primarily ethnographic but also incorporates historical, epidemiological and interventional approaches. Her long term research has taken place in Uganda and Tanzania and she has also led studies in Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Zimbabwe, India, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar and the United Kingdom. She has a keen interest in capacity strengthening both in practice and as a research topic. She has provided technical advice to the UK Government, WHO, LMIC governments and the media on topics including Ebola, malaria and AMR. She serves on numerous professional and policy committees internationally.
Affiliations
Centres
Teaching
At LSHTM Clare Chandler teaches Medical Anthropology and Qualitative Methods and tutors on the Public Health for Development MSc as well as supervising a range of MSc dissertations each year.
Research
Clare is Principal Investigator for the ESRC funded Anti-Microbials In Society (AMIS) Programme, which aims to bring fresh perspectives to social studies of antimicrobial resistance. The Programme includes empirical studies in Thailand and Uganda that explore ethnographically the ways that antibiotics are entangled with the ways our societies and economies are arranged. The research focuses on antibiotics used by humans - in cities, villages, migrant settlements, health facilities; by animals - in small scale and industrial pig and poultry farms; and in plants - specifically citrus production. The grant also funds the AMIS Hub platform, which profiles high quality social research on AMR through a library of essential readings, people and projects listings, thematic summaries and commentaries.
Clare leads the social science research for the FCDO funded FIEBRE programme in Zimbabwe, Malawi and Myanmar. This research looks at antibiotic use in practice for residents and health care providers, and has highlighted the ways that these substances have ended up organising health care, patients, development, research and policy.
Clare is co-lead together with Richard Stabler as the LSHTM Host Institution for the Fleming Fund's Fellowship programme, through which a team of mentors are supporting fellows in government institutions in Ghana, Kenya and Zimbabwe.
Clare holds a number of smaller grants, and collaborates with the Agriculture and Infectious Diseases group, to address specific research questions around
- Awareness of antibiotic resistance amongst human and animal healthcare practitioners
- Measurement of antibiotic use across humans and animals in Low and Middle Income Countries
- Histories of antibiotics in Uganda, Malawi and Zimbabwe
- WASH and biosecurity interventions for AMR
- The history of WASH as a sector
- Hospital antimicrobial stewardship
Clare's fieldwork has primarily been undertaken in East Africa, where she has worked on the topic of health care since 2004. Her PhD was a hospital ethnography in northeast Tanzania, with a focus on malaria diagnosis. From 2008-2013 Clare was the lead social scientist for the ACT Consortium, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She led project teams in 8 countries in Africa and Asia to undertake formative research, design and evaluation of interventions to improve malaria diagnosis in health facilities, among private drug retailers and with community health workers. A focus of many of these projects was the introduction of rapid diagnostic test technologies into a range of health care settings, and Clare has contributed to a body of qualitative research in this topic. From 2013-2016 Clare held a fellowship funded by the LSHTM's Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund, when she applied critical global health scholarship to the study of global health trials and global health topics.
Since 2016 Clare's primary focus has been on antimicrobial resistance. She researches the ways that antibiotics have become relied upon in different ways across social, economic and political spheres, arguing that antibiotics have become infrastructural in our globalised societies today.
Selected Publications
