Person

Strauss, Sarah

Sarah Strauss was born and raised on the east coast. During high school and college, she was deeply involved in biomedical research, and expected her career path to lie in this direction. She enjoyed the philosophical traditions, though, and so although she worked in molecular biology laboratories, she also majored in comparative religion. During her final year in college, she discovered medical anthropology, and that changed everything. A career in anthropology would allow her to pursue all of her research interests, from health and human biology to myth and religion. After graduating, she moved to the west coast, and worked as a marketing director for a small software company in Silicon Valley. Strauss first obtained a Master's degree in Public Health, to learn more about health-related aspects of human interaction with the environment, and later a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology. Her dissertation focused on aspects of culture change through transnational flows of ideas, products, and practices related to yoga in India and around the world. One of Dr. Strauss's ongoing research goals is to understand how different cultures define what it means to be healthy and to live a "good life." After moving to Laramie to start work at the University of Wyoming in 1995, Strauss's research branched out from herbal medicine use in Laramie to an NSF-funded study of the "social life of water" in the Swiss Alpine village of Leukerbad. The water project, which began with a focus on the qualities of water resources in relation to their use-value to the community for medicinal, recreational, and other economic purposes, quickly developed a component addressing climate change impacts on water resources, as this became an inescapable part of the research landscape by the early years of the 21st century. In 2003 and 2004, her first two books, an edited volume with Ben Orlove on Weather, Climate, Culture—the first ex