Staff profile

I received my PhD from the Joint Medical Anthropology Program at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Francisco in 2016. My doctoral research, Malarial Proximities, was a multi-sited ethnographic study of pharmaceutical interventions, antimalarial resistance research, and community-based approaches to the fight against malaria in Senegal. My second project, at the Usher Institute at the University of Edinburgh with the Global Health Governance Programme with Professor Devi Sridhar, investigated the development of metrics at the World Bank for measuring success in global health projects, as well as their influence on the global agenda of, and national strategies for, universal health coverage. My most recent research, as a part of Professor Sotiria Grek's METRO project in the Social Policy Department at the University of Edinburgh, interrogated the way statistical capacity development became its own goal in the global push for the Sustainable Development Goals, and how official statistics are situated as, and have become, a new contentious terrain for a growing community of international organisations to stake claims over sustainable futures.

• global health and global governance
• anthropology of data and quantification
• cultures of data science
• anthropology of organisations
• science and technology studies
• pharmaceuticals

Book review

• Tichenor, Marlee, Droney, Damien & Mika, Marissa (2019). Book Forum: Crystal Biruk, Ramah McKay, and Noémi Tousignant. Somatosphere

Chapter in book

• Tichenor, Marlee (2016). The Power of Data: Global Malaria Governance and the Senegalese Data Retention Strike. In Metrics: What Counts in Global Health. Adams, Vincanne Duke University Press. 105-123.

Journal Article

• Bandola-Gill, Justyna, Grek, Sotiria & Tichenor, Marlee (2023). The rise of the reflexive expert? Epistemic, care-ful and instrumental reflexivity in global public policy. Global Social Policy 146801812211453.
• Tichenor, Marlee (2022). Statistical capacity development and the production of epistemic infrastructures. Policy and Society 41(4): 541–554.
• Tichenor, Marlee, Merry, Sally E, Grek, Sotiria & Bandola-Gill, Justyna (2022). Global public policy in a quantified world: Sustainable Development Goals as epistemic infrastructures. Policy and Society 41(4): 431–444.
• Tichenor, Marlee, Winters, Janelle, Storeng, Katerini T., Bump, Jesse, Gaudillière, Jean-Paul, Gorsky, Martin, Hellowell, Mark, Kadama, Patrick, Kenny, Katherine, Shawar, Yusra Ribhi, Songane, Francisco, Walker, Alexis, Whitacre, Ryan, Asthana, Sumegha, Fernandes, Genevie, Stein, Felix & Sridhar, Devi (2021). Interrogating the World Bank’s role in global health knowledge production, governance, and finance. Globalization and Health 17(1).
• Tichenor, Marlee (2020). Metrics. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology
• Tichenor, Marlee (2020). Essential universal health coverage needs local capacity development. The Lancet Global Health 8(6): e748.
• Ganguli-Mitra, Agomoni, Young, Ingrid, Engelmann, Lukas, Harper, Ian, McCormack, Donna, Marsland, Rebecca, Buch Segal, Lotte, Sethi, Nayha, Stewart, Ellen & Tichenor, Marlee (2020). Segmenting communities as public health strategy: a view from the social sciences and humanities. Wellcome Open Research 5: 104.
• Tichenor, Marlee & Sridhar, Devi (2019). Metric partnerships: global burden of disease estimates within the World Bank, the World Health Organisation and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Wellcome Open Research 4: 35.
• Tichenor, Marlee (2017). Data Performativity, Performing Health Work: Malaria and Labor in Senegal. Medical Anthropology 36(5): 436.
• Tichenor, Marlee & Sridhar, Devi (2017). Universal health coverage, health systems strengthening, and the World Bank. BMJ j3347.

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• Tichenor, Marlee (2020). Defining Wellbeing: Tensions in the World Bank’s approach to Universal Health Coverage.
• Tichenor, Marlee & Sridhar, Devi (2018). Disruptors: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.