Dr. Andrea M. Lopez is an Associate Professor with expertise in medical anthropology, urban anthropology, the anthropology of drug use, health inequities, the U.S. welfare state, and subjectivity and social suffering in U.S. urban contexts.

She has over two decades of experience working with unstably housed and homeless people who use drugs, both as a researcher and in a harm reduction direct service capacity. Dr. Lopez’s anthropological research objectives are broadly concerned with how subjectivities are formed within the context of U.S. War-on-Drugs policies, which include punishment, racialization, and social exclusion of communities impacted by historical legacies that produce health inequities. She has a long history of doing ethnographic and community-engaged work to understand the ways that punitive governance is built into health and social welfare systems and how historically marginalized communities organize against necropolitical social contexts.