Andrea Kaiser-Grolimund is a research associate and lecturer in the field of medical anthropology at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Basel and postdoctoral scientific collaborator at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH). Andrea is a member of the Medical Anthropology Research Group (MARG) and her position has a strong focus on the interdisciplinary and cross-faculty collaboration between the Institute of Social Anthropology and the Swiss TPH through teaching and research in the field of medical anthropology.  

She completed her dissertation in 2018 titled The New Old Urbanites. Care and Transnational Aging in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania  within the framework of a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Her dissertation project used an ethnographic approach to explore how people over the age of 60 live their everyday lives in Tanzania's economic hub of Dar es Salaam, focusing on a former civil servant milieu that is part of Dar es Salaam's middle class. Through multi-sited research, the study further explored how children or relatives living in the U.S. are engaged through transnational care practices.

From 2018 to 2019 she worked as a research associate and project leader of the CASCADE study at the Institute of Nursing Science and the Department of Clinical Research at the University of Basel, focusing on family communication around hereditary cancers in three language regions of Switzerland. From 2020 to 2022, she was involved in the SNSF-funded PubliCo project of the Swiss Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine (IBME) and Swiss TPH, which developed an online platform to collect "real-time data" on public perceptions of Covid-19 in Switzerland using a qualitative diary approach.

Andrea studied Social Anthropology and Law (BA 2008) at the University of Basel and the University of Lausanne and completed her Master at the Center for African Studies (MA 2010) where she also worked as an assistant in 2011. She wrote her master's thesis in the field of human animal health and in collaboration with Swiss TPH and the University of Lomé, Togo. From 2015 to 2018, she coordinated the Anthro-Zoonoses Network at Durham University, UK, together with Hannah Brown. As part of the ERC-funded ALIVEAfrica project at Durham University, she is currently investigating the design, prioritization, and organization of “One Health” policies and projects through interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with leading scientists and policy makers in Switzerland, Sierra Leone, and Kenya.

Focus in Teaching:
Qualitative research methods, courses on and in the field of medical anthropology and introductory courses in anthropology.

Field research:
Togo: 2009 (2 months), 2010 (2 months), Tanzania: 2012 (6 months), 2013 (6 months), 2015 (2 months), USA: 2014 (2 months), Switzerland: 2019-2022 (ongoing)

• Aging
• (Cancer) Care
• Migration
• Middle Classes
• Urban Anthropology
• Anthropology of Epidemics
• Human Animal Health
• "One Health"

• Togo
• Tanzania
• Switzerland