First Place: Inez F. Adams (Georgetown University) “An Ethnographic Evaluation of Michigan’s High-Risk Hepatitis-B Vaccination Program.”

At the time of this award, Ms. Adams was a PhD student at Michigan State University and doing a research fellowship at Georgetown University’s Lombardi Cancer Center on how trust and discrimination, at both individual and institutional levels, affect breast cancer treatment options for Black women. Her research interests are in health disparities due to social class and racial/ethnic differences. She had done public health research in both urban and extreme rural areas of Michigan. For her dissertation research, she was planning to examine disparity in access to and utilization of healthcare between northern and southern regions of Italy.

Second Place: Michelle Albus (SUNY Buffalo) “Health Change in Patients Using Alternative Medical Systems in Cuenca, Ecuador.”

At the time of this award, Ms. Albus was a PhD student at SUNY Buffalo and interested in doing research on religious healing in Puerto Rico. In particular, she was interested in seeing how the religion of Santeria, is being used for healthcare on the island, and the contexts in which people choose to use Santeria from among other healthcare systems, including biomedicine. Her M.A. research (for this paper), was completed in 1998 while she was a student at Washington State University.

Third Place: Karen Greenough (University of Kentucky) “Development Agents and Nomadic Agency: Four Perspectives in the Development ‘Market’.”

At the tme of her award, Ms. Greenough was conducting fieldwork in Niger, and she was not able to be present to receive her award at the 2003 annual AAA meeting