Experts on countries of origin by country

Samantha Serrano earned her Sc.D. in Collective Health from the Federal Medical School of São Paulo. Her research was the Bolivian immigrant women’s experiences in motherhood and family healthcare in São Paulo, Brazil. She has an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Her Master’s thesis was an institutional ethnography on the perceptions and treatments of the sexuality and sexual abuse of people with intellectual disabilities and mental illnesses in urban Guatemala. 

Samantha has multiple international and domestic publications and has conducted fieldwork in the United States, Guatemala and Brazil. Her areas of specialization include: the social determinants of health, health systems and policies, immigrant healthcare, intercultural healthcare, primary healthcare access, healthcare and disability, transnational motherhood, sexual violence, domestic violence, ethnography and qualitative research methods.

Neha Vora is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology & Sociology at Lafayette College. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine. Her areas of expertise include migration, citizenship, higher education, South Asian and Muslim diasporas, gender, labor, race, liberalism, political economy, and the state, in the Arabian Peninsula region and in the United States. She is the author of Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2013) and Teach for Arabia: American Universities, Liberalism, and Transnational Qatar (Stanford University Press, 2018). She has also published a co-authored book with Ahmed Kanna and Amelie Le Renard, Beyond Exception: New Interpretations of the Arabian Peninsula (Cornell University Press, 2020).

Leah Zani, Ph.D. (she, ze, they) is a public anthropologist, author, and poet. Zani earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine, where she studied the effects of air warfare in Laos. She trained as a researcher with the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with the Nobel prize-winning Mines Advisory Group. She has presented her research in Laos to the United States Congress. Recently, she held the Human Rights Seat of the American Anthropological Association, where she advised leadership on global issues of academic freedom. Zani currently serves as a Scholar Rescue Fund Ambassador, assisting displaced scholars as they seek asylum in the United States. She has written for Cultural Anthropology, Kenyon Review, Consequence, and SAPIENS, among others. She is the author of Strike Patterns, winner of the 2023 IPPY Gold Prize for Creative Nonfiction.

Dr. Tara Rava Zolnikov focuses on aspects of culture in a global health setting. Dr. Zolnikov earned a Ph.D in Developmental Science from North Dakota State University and an M.S. in Environmental Health from Harvard School of Public Health and a second M.S. in Industrial Hygiene from Montana Tech of the University of Montana and is currently studying her third MS degree in Sport Psychology at NorthCentral University and is expected to graduate in 2024. She also earned a B.S. degree in Biological Sciences from Montana Tech of the University of Montana.  She has been a professor of global health and environmental health for the last decade.  She also has chaired and been on committees in over 400 doctoral projects; to date, she has graduated over 150 PsyD’s under her guidance and tutelage. She was also recently accepted as a fellow of ultra elite The Explorer's Club.  Dr. Zolnikov’s research primarily focuses on global health issues in low and middle-income countries, including Kenya, Ghana, India, Colombia, and Brazil. She has worked with the Kenya Red Cross on a variety of public health projects, ranging from infectious diseases (E.g. Ebola and HIV/AIDS) to access to water projects. She is primarily a qualitative researcher and concentrates on providing… Read more

Dr. Maggie Zraly is a medical and psychological anthropologist with extensive training in public health and mental health. Her research and practice have focused on conflict-affected populations, including survivors of conflict-related sexual violence/genocide-rape and GBV, youth heads of household, and children associated with armed forces and armed groups. Dr. Zraly conducted five years of in-depth fieldwork on the ground in Rwanda between 2003 and 2024. In 2016, she conducted short-term research in Afghanistan on human trafficking, and in 2017, she directed a center for mental health in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. She has completed short deployments for child protection and mental health support in emergency response, the longest of which was for 3 weeks in 2016 across Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, and Serbia to assess the protection situation of forcibly displaced Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi children seeking asylum.