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Adam is a Research Associate of Oxford’s School of Anthropology and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. At UNC, he is based in the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Social Medicine, and the UNC Center for Bioethics.

In his doctoral research, Adam focused on the relationship between food insecurity, everyday food practices, and experiences of intimate partner violence within Kenyan informal settlements. Utilising a biocultural approach, his research provides an ethnographic account of how risk, uncertainty, and food insecurity are experienced and negotiated within households and larger social networks within (and beyond) informal settlements. His interest in food insecurity and development issues in Kenya is ongoing. Adam is a member of a research team led by Dr Neil Carrier (ISCA and Oxford’s African Studies Centre) that aims to elucidate the role of wild and cultivated edible mushrooms in local economies, development innovation strategies, and food security in rural and urban Kenya.

At UNC, Adam works with Dr Joe Tucker and Professor Stuart Rennie on the searcHIV project. In recent years, curing HIV has become a global strategic priority and research efforts in this emerging scientific domain are progressing rapidly. In collaboration with research partners in the UK, Africa, and China, his research focuses on the social and ethical implications of existing (and future) efforts to cure HIV. More specifically, his latest research addresses the experiences of human participants in HIV cure clinical trials, especially those diagnosed and enrolled in studies during the earliest (acute) stages of HIV infection. Funded by a US National Institutes of Health (NIH), this project has field sites in Chapel Hill, USA, Cape Town, South Africa, and Guangzhou, China.

adam_gilbertson@med.unc.edu