Faculty
Margaret Bender
Professor – Department Chair
Sherri Lawson Clark
Associate Professor
Steve Folmar
Associate Professor
Karin Friederic
Associate Professor
Timothy Gitzen
Assistant Professor
On Leave Academic Year 2025-2026
Andrew Gurstelle
Associate Teaching Professor, Academic Director of the Timothy S. Y. Lam Museum of Anthropology
Archaeology
Palmer Building/Lam Museum of Anthropology
Jessica MacLellan
Assistant Professor
Paul Thacker
Associate Professor
On Leave Academic Year 2025-2026
Affiliated Faculty
Thomas Arcury
Professor Emeritus, Department of Family and Community Medicine, WFU School of Medicine
Ph.D.,University of Kentucky
Medical anthropologist and public health scientist with a research program focused on improving the health of rural and minority populations. Since 1996, he has collaborated in a program of community-based participatory research with immigrant farmworkers and poultry processing workers and their families focused on occupational and environmental health and justice. He has authored over 180 refereed articles and he has participated in the development of diverse educational materials intended to return research results to communities. He has also used research results to affect policy change.
Jay Kaplan
Ph.D., Northwestern
Physical anthropologist and primatologist who teaches one Anthropology course each semester, investigates how psychosocial stress influences disease. His latest research concerns the neurobiology of aggression, especially the unanticipated association among low cholesterol, reduced brain serotonin, and increased violence. Dr. Kaplan is President-elect of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, and Associate Editor or the American Journal of Primatology, and helps direct a primate research and training program at Bogor University, Indonesia. His primary appointment is as Professor of Comparative Medicine and Associate Director of the Comparative Medicine Clinical Research Center at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine.
Sara A. Quandt
Professor Emerita, Department of Epidemiology and Prevention, Division of Public Health Sciences, WFU School of Medicine
Ph.D., Michigan State University
Medical and nutritional anthropologist and faculty member of the School of Medicine. Her research focuses on rural and minority populations. She has led multidisciplinary research teams studying health self-management in diabetes and nutrition among older rural adults, as well as the impact of oral health deficits on social interaction and nutritional status. She also has conducted research on the health disparities experienced by immigrant Latino workers in agriculture and poultry processing in rural North Carolina. These include pesticide exposure, green tobacco sickness, food insecurity, and musculoskeletal injuries.