Roy Richard Grinker

Roy Richard Grinker (born 1961) is an author and Professor of Anthropology, International Affairs, and Human Sciences at The George Washington University.

Grinker is an authority on North and South Korean relations. He also spent two years living with the Lese farmers and the Efé pygmies in the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo as a Fulbright scholar, and has conducted epidemiological research on autism in Korea.

Grinker is also editor of Anthropological Quarterly.

Personal life
Grinker was born and raised in Chicago. He graduated from Grinnell College in 1983 and received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University in 1989.

His paternal grandfather, Roy R. Grinker, Sr. founded the psychiatry department at the University of Chicago and was the founding editor of the Archives of General Psychiatry.

His book on autism, Unstrange Minds, was in part an "attempt to make sense of an intensely personal issue: his own daughter's autism."