About

Vaia (Yioula) Sigounas is a sociocultural medical anthropologist working at the intersections of local and global health inequities, humanitarian aid, and science and technology studies of and from East Africa.

Her first book focuses on how people living with limb loss in the United States and Uganda use medical technologies like prosthetic limbs to reconstruct their identities and social relationships. Challenging the idea that science and technological innovation flow from the Global North to the Global South, this book argues that engineers and inventors in Uganda have overcome many of the limitations of transnational medical device design. They have done so by working directly with the intended recipients of these medical devices to co-design devices that are socially acceptable and culturally compatible.

Dr. Sigounas teaches courses about sociocultural anthropology, humanitarian aid, and bodies, technologies, and societies.

A.B. Harvard University
M.D. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine
PhD. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill