Anne Esacove, PhD, MPH, MSW

Anne Esacove is the Co-Principal Investigator and Director of the Reconceptualizing Gender and Health (RGH) Project at SP2’s Sex-Gen Lab. Supported by a Pioneering Ideas grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, RGH is testing the analytical viability of an innovative theoretical framework to capture the mechanisms through which gendered expectations, experience, and systems impact health.

Anne’s research explores how health promotion efforts attempt to create meaning about and control bodies, sexuality, and gender. In addition to RGH, she recently published an article in the American Journal of Public Health that identifies four interlocking and mutually reinforcing patterns of how “cisgender” is used in public health publications and proposes two paths for creating more robust use of the concept. She is also the author of Modernizing Sexuality: U.S. HIV Prevention Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa, based on research funded by a Fulbright African Regional Research grant and Social Science Research Council Sexuality and Policy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Anne received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan and Master Degrees in Public Health and Social Work from the University of Washington in Seattle.