MIT Anthropology Undergraduate Alumni

In addition to our own majors, minors, and concentrators, undergraduate students from a wide array of disciplines take our courses, and many go on to further study in Anthropology and related fields. Here are just a few examples of our undergraduate alumni.

Victoria Fan

Victoria Fan ('06) majored in 2A and minored in 21A where she pursued her interests in international development and public health. After receiving both a masters and doctorate from the Harvard School of Public Health, Victoria chose to work as a research fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD). Her main work currently focuses on the international aid architecture for global health and she is embarking on new work on global public goods for health. She has a special interest in Indian health policy, the focus of her dissertation. She contributes to CGD’s global health policy blog and is on Twitter (@fanvictoria).

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Paul Kominers

Paul Kominers ('12, Economics and Political Science Major) is the research director at TurboVote, a nonprofit building software to streamline and simplify how US citizens participate in elections. While at MIT, he took classes in the anthropology department with Professor Silbey. Those classes helped teach him to think about actors at every level of a system, and sparked his interest in law and society, the public perception of science, and corruption. Paul maintains a personal site and is active on Twitter (@pkominers).

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David Lowry

David Lowry ('07, Anthropology major) is completing a PhD in anthropology at UNC-Chapel Hill. For his dissertation, he conducted ethnographic research with Christian missionaries from the Lumbee Indian community of North Carolina. In fall 2012, he joined the faculty of American University as Lecturer.

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Laura Martini

Laura Martini ('08, Anthropology minor, Mech E major) is a product designer based in Palo Alto, California. From MIT she went to Stanford, where she studied in the human-centered design program affiliated with the d.School while earning an MS in Product Design. She has found ethnography — interviewing, participant-observation, understanding a system from someone else's perspective — to be essential to the design process (and an Anthropology Minor to be helpful in landing an internship with IDEO). Check out her blog and portfolio here: http://martini.mitplw.com/blog/.

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Brian Oldfield

Brian Oldfield ('13) completed a major in mechanical engineering and a minor in energy studies to gain a deep understanding of the challenges of global climate change. In the class Energy Decisions, Markets, and Policies, he began to realize that solving energy issues is much more difficult than solving the associated technical problems. The Anthropology program gave him the tools to understand problems with human decisions, institutional structures, and political processes in mind. With the help of Professor Susan Silbey, he applied these tools to his undergraduate thesis, entitled "US Virgin Islands Renewable Energy Future". After graduation, he will work as an energy consultant for Navigant, focusing on utility-scale efficiency.

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Caroline Rubin

After graduation, Caroline Rubin ('08, Anthropology major) taught middle school science in the South Bronx through Teach For America. She writes, "Experiencing firsthand the opportunity gap between students growing up in low-income communities and their more affluent peers was simultaneously humbling and infuriating, and compelled me to make a long-term commitment to working towards educational equity. I now work on TFA's admissions team in Philadelphia. Educational inequity is a systemic injustice, and my anthropology background has given me the theoretical knowledge and critical thinking skills to truly understand how institutionalized injustice works — as well as how it can be subverted. My anthropology degree also prepared me for working effectively across lines of difference, a skill which has served me well both within and outside the classroom. I feel incredibly lucky to have received the excellent education I did from the MIT anthropology department, which is why I am committed to ensuring that more students have access to high quality educational opportunities."