López, Andrea M.

Bio

Dr. Andrea M. Lopez is an Associate Professor and Associate Director at the Center for Substance Use, Addiction, and Health Research (CESAR) at UMD. She directs the Structural Harm and Health Justice Research Lab, which is co-housed in the Department of Anthropology and CESAR. 

Her broad expertise is 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 nearly three 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 and the impacts of 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. 

Dr. Lopez is committed to rigorous engagement with social theory in the service of liberation and social justice and how to translate social theory into practical applied and community-engaged research. Her social theory courses engage with the traditional anthropological "canon" as well as the histories and theoretical influences that have been historically marginalized such as those of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and queer communities. In addition to social theory courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, Dr. Lopez teaches topical courses such as Hypermarginality and Urban Health and the Anthropology of Global Violence.

Dr. Lopez's body of research has been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, among others. She is engaged in a wide range of collaborative, interdisciplinary drug/health equity research across units at UMD and nationally.

Dr. Lopez was a five-year fellow at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy at the University of New Mexico where she participated in an intensive research and training program focused on interdisciplinary and cross-methodological health disparities research for Latinx and Indigenous scholars. She also has a long history of working in a direct service capacity with community-based organizations serving unstably housed people who use drugs, including the San Francisco Needle Exchange, an outreach program run by the Women’s Community Clinic serving women who reside in single resident occupancy hotels in San Francisco’s Mission District, and as a harm reduction advocate in an outpatient drug treatment program. She sits on the Board of Directors for HIPS, DC's largest harm reduction direct service organization and on the Maryland's Department of Health Statewide Standing Advisory Committee on Opioid Associated Disease Prevention and Outreach Programs, appointed by the Secretary of Health.

Dr. Lopez is a multi-generational Chicana who grew up in El Paso, Texas. 

Google scholar: here.