Kimber Haddix McKay, MA PhD

Kimber Haddix McKay, the ISIS Foundation Country Manager in Nepal, earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Davis in 1998, and held the prestigious Andrew Mellon post-doctoral fellow position in demographic anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley 1998-1999. During that time she consulted for The ISIS Foundation in Nepal and Uganda.

Kimber has long experience with anthropology and health, spanning projects in Central America, Africa, and Nepal. She is a specialist in how and why population patterns vary across cultures and how demographic patterns are related to individual behaviour and health. Her anthropological fieldwork is quantitative in nature and focuses on marriage, fertility, and maternal behaviours during pregnancy, childbirth, and beyond that are associated with maternal and infant morbidity and mortality. Prior to working in Nepal and Kenya in 1994-1996, and 1998-1999, she conducted fieldwork in Honduras in 1992. From 1990-1992 she worked with American and Kenyan medical anthropologists at the Harvard Institute for International Development on a three-culture/ three-continent study of chronic medicine use among epileptics.

Kimber is also interested in population patterns and change, and their relationship to culture and the status of women. She was a visiting scholar at the Population Council in Nairobi, Kenya in 1999. In collaboration with African colleagues, she assisted on a multiethnic project studying the factors that have lowered the population growth rate in Kenya. This focus is an important part of Kimber’s current work in Nepal, where the status of women, the high fertility rate, and lack of health care are important factors affecting women and children’s health in both urban and rural settings.

As t The ISIS Foundation’s Humla and Research Manager, working on a part-time basis, Kimber oversees our Humla work, and designs and manages research projects to ensure that our work on the ground has lasting impact.