PROFILE
 

Vinh-Kim Nguyen is a medical anthropologist and family physician from Montréal, Canada, who also practises in the Canadian Arctic. He has worked in acute care settings in hospitals in Geneva, Switzerland, and Paris, France, and during humanitarian crises in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Guinea (during Ebola outbreaks) and in Yemen (during the ongoing conflict). He led the development and opening of COVID-19 treatment units in hospitals in Geneva, Switzerland, and Montréal, Canada, in 2020. As a result he has a broad experience in pandemic management.

Prof. Nguyen’s award-winning first book examines the introduction of antiretroviral therapy in West Africa and his second book The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa's Time of AIDS, co-authored with Margaret Lock, is a landmark treatise on the anthropology of biomedicine.

He has recently led research projects examining how conflict drives antimicrobial resistance and, most recently, the financialisation of pharmaceuticals. Trained in psychedelic therapy, his latest research examines the “psychedelic renaissance” in Switzerland and beyond. 

THEMATIC EXPERTISE
 

• Pandemics
• Global health diplomacy, global health governance

GEOGRAPHICAL EXPERTISE
 

• Mayotte
• Uganda
• Democratic Republic of the Congo
• Gabon
• Benin
• Burkina Faso
• Côte d'Ivoire
• Guinea
• Liberia
• Mali
• Nigeria
• Senegal
• Sierra Leone
• Togo
• Lebanon
• Melanesia: Fiji,, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatua

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
 

• Lock, M., and V.K. Nguyen. An Anthropology of Biomedicine. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
• Nguyen, V.K. “Antiretroviral Globalism, Biopolitics, and Therapeutic Citizenship.” In Global Assemblages, edited by Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, 124–44. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2008.
• Nguyen, V.K. The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS. Duke University Press Books, 2010.
• Nguyen, V.K., and K. Peschard. “Anthropology, Inequality, and Disease: A Review.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 2003, 447–74.
• Nguyen, V.K., C.Y. Ako, P. Niamba, A. Sylla, and I. Tiendrébéogo. “Adherence as Therapeutic Citizenship: Impact of the History of Access to Antiretroviral Drugs on Adherence to Treatment.” AIDS 21 (2007): S31–S35.
• Nguyen, V.K., N. Bajos, F. Dubois-Arber, J. O’Malley, and C.M. Pirkle. “Remedicalizing an Epidemic: From HIV Treatment as Prevention to HIV Treatment Is Prevention.” AIDS 25, no. 3 (2011): 291.
• Nguyen, V.K. “Government-by-Exception: Enrolment and Experimentality in Mass HIV Treatment Programmes in Africa.” Social Theory & Health 7, no. 3 (2009): 196–217.
• Nguyen, V.K. “Uses and Pleasures: Sexual Modernity, HIV/AIDS, and Confessional Technologies in a West African Metropolis.” Sex in Development: Science, Sexuality, and Morality in Global Perspective, 2005,245–68.

ACTIVITIES
 

• Practices Emergency Medicine at the Jewish General Hospital in Montréal.
• Holds an ERC Consolidator Grant (Research Chair) on the science and politics of a world without AIDS.
• Heads a team of anthropologists researching the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.
• Professor in the School of Public Health the University of Montreal.
• Holds an honorary chair at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris.