Helena Hansen, an MD, Ph.D. psychiatrist-anthropologist, is Professor and Interim Chair of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, and Interim Director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. She is an international leader in the field of social medicine, and of integration of rigorous social science into academic medicine as well as into research on social determinants of health and health equity. She popularized the term “Translational Social Science” by launching UCLA medical school’s research theme in Health Equity and Translational Social Science as its inaugural chair from 2020-2023 . She is the author of three books: Whiteout: How Racial Capitalism Changed the Color of Opioids in America(with Jules Netherland and David Herzberg, University of California Press 2023); Structural Competency in Medicine and Mental Health: A Case-Based Approach to Treating the Social Determinants of Health (with Jonathan Metzl, Springer Press 2019); and Addicted to Christ: Remaking Men in Puerto Rican Pentecostal Drug Ministries (University of California Press 2018). She is the author of over 100 articles and chapters in leading clinical and social science journals, serves or has served on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Psychiatry, American Anthropologist, Milbank Quarterly and Medical Anthropology Quarterly among others, serves on the governing boards of the International Society for Addiction Medicine, the Lancet Commission on US Health Policy, the National Academy of Medicine Opioid Action Collaborative and the Drug Policy Alliance among others, and has received numerous awards, including an honorary doctorate from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and election to the National Academy of Medicine in 2021.
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