Merrill Singer

Merrill Singer is a medical anthropologist known for his research on substance abuse, HIV/AIDS, health disparities, and minority health. Director of the Center for Community Health Research at the Hispanic Health Council in Hartford, CT, he helped to develop the theoretical perspective within medical anthropology known as critial medical anthropology. Dr. Singer also developed the public health concepts of syndemics and oppression illness.

The first of these terms refers to the clustering of diseases in populations and the biological interaction of diseases in individual bodies. Moreover, the term syndemics also points to the determinant importance of social conditions in disease concentrations, interactions, and health consequences. In syndemics, the interaction of diseases or other adverse health conditions commonly arises because of adverse social conditions (e.g., poverty, exploitative, stigmatization, oppressive social relationships) that put socially devalued groups at heightened risk. The term oppression illness refers to the internalization of social discrimination and the health consequences of coming to accept one does not deserve to be healthy.

In addition to his work at the Hispanic Health Council, Dr. Singer is affiliated with the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA) at Yale University and the Center for Health/HIV Intervention and Prevention (CHIP) at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Singer, in addition, is a senior research scientist in the department of anthropology at the University of Connecticut.

In 1991, Singer was the winner of the Society for Medical Anthropology's Critical Anthropology for Global Health Study Group Rudolph Virchow Award for his work-- Reinventing Medical Anthropology: Toward a Critical Realignment, Social Science and Medicine 30(2):179-187 (1990).

Research
Dr. Singer has been the Principal Investigator on a continuous series of federal and foundation funded drinking, drug use, and AIDS prevention grants since 1984, and currently is the Principal Investigator on a CDC-funded study designed to monitor emergent drug use trends and to build community health responses to identified public health risk. Additionally, he is Co-investigator on four studies:
 * 1) Sexual communication and risk among inner city young adults (CDC)
 * 2) Assessing the implementation of oral HIV testing among injection drug users in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil (NIDA)
 * 3) Ethical issues in research with active drug users (NIDA)
 * 4) Testing the implementation of hepatitis B vaccination of injection drug users in Hartford and Chicago (NIDA).

Family
Dr. Singer is the father of two children, Jacob Hillis Singer and Elyse Ona Singer; both are in college.

Publications
Dr. Singer’s three most recent books are Something Dangerous: Emergent and Changing Illicit Drug Use and Community Health, The Face of Social Suffering: Life History of a Street Drug Addict (Waveland Press, 2005) and New Drugs on the Street (Haworth Press, 2005). Additionally, he has published over 135 scholarly articles and 40 book chapters. Dr. Singer was selected as the first recipient of the Practicing Anthropology Award by the Society for Medical Anthropology in 2004 and received a Career Recognition Award from the Society for the Anthropology of North America in 2005. Previously he was awarded both the AIDS and Anthropology Paper Prize and the Rudoph Virchow Prize through the Society for Medical Anthropology. His other books include:
 * Merrill Singer, Lani Davison and Fuat Yalin (Eds.) Alcohol Use and Abuse Among Hispanic Adolescents. Hartford, CT: Hispanic Health Council, 1987.
 * Hans Baer and Merrill Singer. African American Religion in the Twentieth Century: Diversity in Protest and Accommodation. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1992
 * Ralph Bolton and Merrill Singer (Eds.) Rethinking AIDS Prevention: Cultural Approaches. New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1992.
 * Merrill Singer and Hans Baer Critical Medical Anthropology.  Amiytyville, New York: Baywood Publishing Co., 1995.
 * Merrill Singer (Ed.) The Political Economy of AIDS.  Amityville, New York: Baywood Publishing Co., 1997.
 * Hans Baer, Merrill Singer and Ida Susser. Medical Anthropology and the World System. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Co., 1997.
 * Patricia Marshall, Merrill Singer, and Michael Clatts (Eds.) Integrating Cultural, Observational, and Epidemiological Approaches in the Prevention of Drug Abuse and HIV/AIDS.  Rockville, MD: National Institute on Drug Abuse, 1999.
 * Jean Schensul, M. LeCompte, Robert Trotter, E. Cromley, and Merrill Singer. Mapping Social Networks, Spatial Data and Hidden Populations.  Book 4, The Ethnographer's Toolkit.  Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 1999.
 * Margaret LeCompte, Jean Schensul, Margaret Weeks and Merrill Singer. Researcher Roles and Research Partnerships. Books 6, The Ethnographer's Toolkit.  Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 1999.
 * Yun, Wu, Wang Qitian, Cong Rihui, Jianghong Li, Ian Newman, Merrill Singer, Christopher Bates, and Michael Duke (Eds.) New Advancements in Preventive Medicine:  Textbook of Continuing Medical Education of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Hohhot, Inner Mongolia: Yuanfang Press, 2002.
 * Arachu Castro and Merrill Singer (Eds.) Unhealthy Health Policy: A Critical Anthropological Examination. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2004.
 * Merrill Singer Something Dangerous: Emergent and Changing Illicit Drug Use and Community Health. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2006.
 * Merrill Singer (Ed.) New Drugs on the Street: Changing Patterns of Illicit Consumption. New York: Haworth Press, 2005.
 * Benjamin P. Bowser, Ernest Quimby and Merrill Singer (Eds.) Communities Assessing Their AIDS Epidemics: Results of the Rapid Assessment of HIV/AIDS in U.S. Cities.  Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2006.
 * Merrill Singer The Face of Social Suffering: Life History of a Street Drug Addict. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2006.