Dorinda Welle '85

For a time during her graduate study, Dorinda Welle slept on the streets of New York City and hung out at Penn Station. It was all part of an effort to evaluate the first census of homeless persons in the city. Roughing it also allowed Welle to discover and document how some of the homeless put together improvised families as a survival strategy.

Welle, who holds an M.A. in medical anthropology and a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the New School for Social Research as well as a B.A. in philosophy from Lewis & Clark College, considers fieldwork to be critical. She also finds it compelling on a personal level, something she discovered about herself while an undergraduate. “The College’s Kenya program let me begin to discover my own interests—in anthropology, public health, writing—and pursue those outside the safety of the classroom. It’s where I learned the power of using who you are and your own experience to learn about others, who they are, what they experience.”

Several populations and issues have fallen under her eye. Welle served as an ethno-historian on the African Burial Ground Project in New York City. From 1994 to 1998, she followed 60 women drug offenders in New York and Oregon, focusing on the effects of drug treatment on rates of active addiction and recidivism. In a recent study of drug users in China, Welle and her colleagues examined the contexts of heroin injection and uncovered a growing interest in drug treatment and harm reduction in that country.

Currently, she is completing research funded by the National Institutes of Health into the HIV/AIDS epidemic and its impact on adolescent development and sexuality, and is teaching and serving as scientific director for the 2006 Summer Institute at the National Sexuality Research Center in San Francisco. She is also an adjunct assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and director of Youth and Community Development Research for the Institute for International Research on Youth at Risk, one of the National Development and Research Institutes.

In March, Welle returned to Lewis & Clark to attend the College’s 25th annual Gender Studies Symposium, at which she presented her HIV/AIDS research. “Lewis & Clark was teaching critical theory about gender, class, race, and social justice when I was taking classes with Sevin Hirschbein, Clayton Morgareidge, Grey Osterud, and Zaher Wahab—well before programs like Gender Studies were in place,” she noted.

(Posted May 2006)