Justin Clapp is Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology and Critical Care at the Perelman School of Medicine and Associated Faculty in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and his MPH from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.
Dr. Clapp is a linguistic/medical anthropologist who uses qualitative methods along with anthropological theory to examine issues in healthcare communication, medical decision making, and empirical bioethics. Much of his recent work has focused on better understanding how providers and patients decide on elective treatment options in perioperative contexts (surgery, anesthesia, intensive care). The goal of this work is to reformulate models of medical decision making so that they better capture the intricacies of provider-patient interaction and the ways in which these interactions are situated in broader cultural and institutional processes.
Dr. Clapp teaches courses in the Anthropology department and the MPH program, and he collaborates with investigators across the Perelman School of Medicine on qualitative projects.