By Jason Pohl, Photo: from article, Greater Good Magazine, July 6, 2023
Andrew Kim’s mind raced as he entered the sprawling South African hospital. It was 2017, and Kim, at the time a Northwestern University biological anthropology graduate student, was researching how a woman’s stress while pregnant can affect the mental health of her child. It was exciting work with possible international implications, the type of big-picture research puzzle he had long dreamed of solving.
His mind teemed with questions: How would a Black South African mother’s trauma from apartheid three decades earlier shape the life of her child? How might racism, systemic oppression, and other afflictions affect the ways a person’s body and brain respond to stress, disease, and psychological disorders? And what can our individual stories teach us about mental illness?
Today, Kim is a recently hired assistant professor of biological anthropology at UC Berkeley who hopes his ever-expanding list of research projects will inspire mental health interventions and improve people’s lives—maybe even save them.
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