Biography

Lily Shapiro, PhD, MPH, is a medical anthropologist who focuses on care/caregiving, health systems navigation, and aging and dementia. She currently works on the ACT (Adult Changes in Thought) Study, designing research that investigates the lived experience of patients with dementia and their caregivers. She has particular interest in patients who do not have living close kin or otherwise have nontraditional family/caregiving arrangements, and in developing interventions that can better support them.

Her previous research focused on workplace accidents and reconstructive plastic surgery in South India. Although topically different from her current research on aging and dementia, the research methods and broader questions — about care and caregiving, how people navigate the health care system, how various systems make this easier or more difficult, and how these experiences are framed by historical, economic, social, and familial structures — are largely similar.

At KPWHRI, Lily also contributes to mixed methods studies, conducts qualitative survey response analyses, and collaborates on cancer care research, focusing on how people experience and think about their cancer. Innovative qualitative methods are among her other interests, including the use of natural language processing and other machine learning techniques to glean qualitative insights from nontraditional data sources, such as medical records.

Lily received her bachelor’s in anthropology from Amherst College, and her master’s and PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Washington. She also received a master’s in public health from UW.

In her free time, Lily enjoys running, gardening, cooking, and exploring the outdoors with her family.