My Biography
Dr. Adriana Petryna is the recipient of the 2023 the Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology. This is an annual prize given by the AAA to encourage and reward excellent contributions in the use of anthropological perspectives, theories, models and methods in an anticipatory mode.
Adriana Petryna is a professor of anthropology and director of the MD-PhD Program in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. In her research and writing on nuclear aftermaths, global drug trial development, and the climate emergency, she has explored diversity in the socio-political natures of science, how populations are enrolled in experimental knowledge-productions, and what becomes of ethics and citizenship in that process. In addition to her co-edited volumes on global health, she is the author of Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl and When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects; and Horizon Work: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change. Her research has been supported by The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the School for Advanced Research. She was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study and a Faculty Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values.