Originally trained as a medical doctor in South Africa, Hayley MacGregor pursued further studies in Social Anthropology, completing a PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2003. This doctoral research pursued an interest in medical anthropology, in particular mental illness and mental health service provisioning in post conflict and low income settings.
A subsequent period at the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa broadened her work to address changes in social security provisioning in the event of illness, and the politics of ‘disability’. Current research interests include emerging infectious disease; the anthropology of antimicrobial resistance; informality in health provision; and concepts of care and chronicity in responses to lifelong illness, principally HIV. Hayley’s primary ethnographic work has been in South Africa, but she is involved in work elsewhere in Africa, and in SE Asia. She has been a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies since 2007 and co-leads the Health and Nutrition research cluster. Hayley retains clinical registration with the General Medical Council of the UK, with an honorary contract in clinical psychiatry.