Margaret Lock

Lock, an internationally acclaimed medical anthropologist, researches epistemologies of medical knowledge and practice; anthropology and epigenetics, and the microbiome. Author and/or co-editor of 17 books and over 200 articles,  Encounters with Aging: Mythologies of Menopause in Japan and North America won seven prizes. Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death, and The Alzheimer Conundrum: Entanglements of Dementia and Aging, are also prize-winning volumes. Lock is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Leading medical anthropologist who also made serious and important contributions to the study of Japanese society. Her first book described traditional East Asian medicine in Japan. Her next was a tour de force study that compared menopause in the U.S. and Japan and set the evidence-base for her influential conceptualization of local biology. The latter is the centerpiece of her subsequent books on the transplantation and brain death debates. All of these works are based in thorough and telling ethnography. Latterly she has co-written the anthropology of biomedicine and most recently the social study of the science of Alzheimer's.