Among the six University of Kentucky professors receiving the 2011 Great Teacher Award for their excellence in the classroom by the UK Alumni Association is Assistant Professor of Anthropology Erin Koch.

Watch the video highlighting all the honorees

Started in 1961, the Great Teacher Award is the oldest continuous award that recognizes teaching at UK. The nominations are made by students. Selection of the award recipients is made by the UK Alumni Association Great Teacher Award Committee, in cooperation with the student organization Omicron Delta Kappa. Great Teacher Award recipients each receive a citation, an engraved plaque, and a cash award.

Erin Koch Feature Story - Health Inequalities and the State

Erin Koch is an assistant professor of anthropology in the UK College of Arts and Sciences, teaching courses on medical anthropology, global health, the former Soviet Union, anthropological theory and ethnographic research methods. Prior to joining the UK Department of Anthropology in 2007, she taught at Middlebury College in Vermont. Koch’s research concentrates on anthropological studies of medicine, science and technology, infectious disease, humanitarianism, and post-socialism. She is completing a book titled “Free Market Tuberculosis: Managing Medicine in the Republic of Georgia.” She examines changes in knowledge production and service distribution in Georgia’s post-Soviet national tuberculosis program, focusing on the experiences of laboratory technicians, physicians, non-governmental organization workers and administrators. Her current research in Georgia investigates health effects of war and displacement and humanitarian interventions. She has received grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, The International Research and Exchanges Board, and the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. She has published in American Ethnologist, and Medical Anthropology: Cross Cultural Studies in Health and Illness. Koch earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993, and a doctoral degree in anthropology from the New School for Social Research in New York in 2005.