Prof. Anita Hardon is Chair of the Knowledge, Technology and Innovation (KTI) Group at Wageningen University and Chair of the Social Sciences and Humanities domain at the Dutch Research Council (NWO). She is also a member of the Executive Board of the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development (AIGHD). Trained as both a medical anthropologist and a biologist, she has led pioneering interdisciplinary research on the social lives of medicines, youth chemical practices, and global health interventions, working closely with communities across the Global South. Her affiliations include international advisory roles with WHO, UNAIDS, the European Commission, and various Dutch ministries, and she has held visiting professorships at institutions such as Stanford, Duke, and the University of the Philippines.
Her recent ERC Advanced Grant project, Embodied Ecologies, explores how people sense and respond to chemical exposures in urban environments, using ethnographic and design methods. This builds on her previous ERC project, ChemicalYouth, which examined how young people experiment with pharmaceuticals and other substances in their pursuit of productivity, pleasure, and well-being. She currently leads the Beyond Trade-offs project on PFAS pollution in the Netherlands (NWO SSH) and Confident Futures, a participatory project evaluating successful youth initiatives (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation). Across these projects, she fosters innovative, collaborative ethnographic methods and actively disseminates results to policy, academic, and activist audiences.
Beyond her academic work, Prof. Hardon is active in science-policy advisory roles, journal editing, and mentoring. She serves as associate editor for Medical Anthropology and Medical Anthropology Theory, and is a member of several scientific boards, including the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM). She has founded multiple interdisciplinary networks and organized key international conferences on health, chemicals, and ethnography. As a dedicated mentor, she has supervised over 30 PhD students, many from the Global South, who now hold leading academic positions worldwide. She also engages in public outreach through film, such as the ethnographic documentary Sweet Medicine, and regularly gives invited lectures around the globe.
At AMS Institute, Prof. Hardon contributes her expertise in ethnography, care technologies, and participatory research to address urban sustainability challenges. Her role involves co-developing research initiatives that foreground citizen perspectives and embodied experiences in urban health and environmental issues, especially those related to chemical exposure and circular systems. She supports interdisciplinary collaborations among social scientists, designers, and engineers, and helps ensure that AMS’s innovation agendas remain socially grounded and inclusive.