Across The Parking Lot and Into Public Health Again

Almost two years ago on a cool early summer day I packed up my books and other tools of the occupation, put them in my car, and drove from the medical school department where I had been "postdocing" across a parking lot to the state department of health. For me this represented a return to the public health arena after an absence of about ten years. I often refer in jest to my colleagues about the rut I am wearing in the parking lot during my continuing travels between the health department and the medical school. My hikes across the parking lot symbolize not only the life I am presently leading, one with a mix of applied biomedical research and public health administration and teaching; they also resemble the period in my graduate training when a similar mixture was necessitated by economics as well as a desire to learn more about community health. The following is an account of my journey as an applied biological anthropologist, using that label as the late Albert Damon did to describe practitioners in what he hoped would be a growth area in biological anthropology.