Barbara Rylko-Bauer

Barbara Rylko-Bauer is a medical anthropologist and adjunct associate professor at Michigan State University. She earned a degree in microbiology from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D from the University of Kentucky. Her research and study efforts have focused on inequities in health care, social suffering, human rights, the Holocaust, and violence.

The author of A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps: My Mother’s Memories of Imprisonment, Immigration, and a Life Remade, a memoir based on her mother’s time in the Nazi labor camps and the years after. Her mother was a prisoner turned doctor in the camp who later immigrated to the United States. This biographical work was a 2015 Gold Medalist in Biography for the Independent Publisher Book Awards, the Library of Michigan’s 2015 Michigan Notable Book, the Gold Medal in Biography for IndieFab’s Book of the Year Awards, and was a finalist for the 2016 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing.

Rylko-Bauer was awarded the Rudolph Virchow Award in recognition for her research work on health and violence, in collaboration with Paul Farmer and Linda Whiteford. She has been an editor for publications such as the Medical Anthropology Quarterly and for the AAA Committee on Practicing, Applied, and Public Interest Anthropology.

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