Mara Buchbinder

Mara Buchbinder is Professor and Vice Chair of Social Medicine, Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, and core faculty in the Center for Bioethics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a medical anthropologist specializing in cultures of health, illness, and medicine in the United States. Her recent work focuses on how patients, families, and healthcare providers navigate social and ethical challenges resulting from changes in medical technology, law, and health policy. Buchbinder's most recent book, Scripting Death: Stories of Assisted Dying in America, chronicles two years of ethnographic research documenting the implementation of Vermont’s Patient Choice and Control at End of Life Act. Weaving together stories collected from patients, caregivers, health care providers, activists, and legislators, it illustrates how they navigate medical aid-in-dying as a new medical frontier in the aftermath of legalization. Scripting Death explains how medical aid-in-dying works, what motivates people to pursue it, and ultimately, why upholding the “right to die” is very different form ensuring access to this life-ending procedure. In 2015, Buchbinder was selected for a Greenwall Faculty Scholars Award (2015-2018), a career development award which enables junior faculty to carry out innovative bioethics research. In 2017, she received a Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement by Young Faculty at UNC – Chapel Hill. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Buchbinder lives in Durham, NC with her husband and son. Visit her website at marabuchbinder.com.