May 13, 2025 — The Dean of Dedman College ad interim, Nathan Balke, has announced that the next Chair of the Department of Anthropology will be Neely Laurenzo Myers, Professor of Anthropology and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at UT Southwestern Medical School. She will be appointed to a three-year term.
Myers joined the faculty at SMU in 2014. In addition to her appointments in the Department of Anthropology and at UT Southwestern, she is Editor-in-Chief of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. A psychological and medical anthropologist, her research focuses on cross-cultural experiences of mental health, mental illness, and mental health care. Since 2009, her ethnographic and mixed-methods research in the United States and northern Tanzania has been supported nearly continuously by the National Institutes of Health. She is the author of Recovery’s Edge, a prize-winning ethnography about peer services for persons with serious mental illness, (Vanderbilt University Press, 2004) and Breaking Points: Youth Mental Health Crises and How We All Can Help (University of California Press, 2024), as well as more than 30 scholarly articles and book chapters. She also directs SMU’s Mental Health Innovations Lab and is deeply committed to mentoring undergraduate and graduate students. Outside academia, she enjoys hiking and playing the violin.