PhD Student

I am a medical anthropologist by training with a strong focus on participant observation, participant-analytical ethnography, qualitative analysis, and ethics. 

From Uganda Christian University-Mukono, I earned my first degree Bachelor of Science in Development Studies in 2006. After receiving my BA, I continued my post-graduate studies in project planning and management at the Uganda Management Institute in 2010. At Gulu University in Uganda, where I earned my Master's in medical anthropology in 2019, I worked as a student assistant from 2016-2018. In my MA dissertation, I examined how parents in Gulu responded to adolescents suffering from serious mental illnesses. 

Still at Gulu University, I was employed as a Ph.D. candidate in the research project "Trust in medicine during EVD outbreak" in collaboration with Martin Luther University-Halle which was funded by the DFG in 2017. 

Currently, I continue to work on my Ph.D. thesis under the “Trust in Medicine” project at the Bernhard-Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (BNITM). My research project title focuses on: “Care and care practices during and after Ebola outbreaks: An ethnographic investigation of frontline healthcare workers and Ebola survivors of the 2000–2001 Ebola outbreak in Gulu, Uganda”, advised by Dr. Sung-Joon Park at the BNITM and Professor Dr. Hansjörg Dilger at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Free University Berlin. In my research I am interested in how care changes and degrades due to medical interventions that are perceived as degrading treatment by Ebola survivors. 

Since 2020, I am also a research associate at the Child Health and Development Centre at Makerere University. 

Research interests: Infectious Disease Anthropology, specific areas: care, morality, and ethics; emerging infectious diseases.

E-Mail: grace.oroma-lanek@bnitm.de