Samantha Hurst, Ph.D. is an Assistant Project Scientist in the UCSD Department of Family and Preventive Medicine.  As a medical anthropologist, her areas of expertise focus within cross-cultural health, ethnocultural assessment of psychological stress and trauma, refugee health, community-based participatory research, and qualitative methodology. Dr. Hurst is a Lead Investigator and Consumer Advisory Board Liaison with the INTRuST Post Traumatic Stress Disorder/Traumatic Brain Injury Clinical Consortium.  She is also currently partnering with San Diego Somali community organizations to develop a men’s preventive health program for implementation.

Dr. Hurst also works at the VA San Diego as a Research Health Science Specialist for Health Services Research and Development and also with the Center of Excellence in Stress and Mental Health.  She is a co-investigator for a study exploring factors that influence and engage veteran’s decisions to seek out and utilize mental health services and also serves on the research staff of  a primary care study examining the influence of the electronic medical record system in physician-patient communication.

Dr. Hurst received her Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and did her Post-Doctoral Fellowship training as a Medical Anthropologist in the Alcohol Research Center at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla.

    

                                                                   

“the purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences” - Ruth Benedict