The Institute for Community Research (ICR) is pleased to announce that Jean J. Schensul, Ph.D., ICR’s Founding Director and Sr. Research Scientist, is the recipient of the 2010 Bronislaw Malinowski Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology. The Award will be formally presented to Dr. Schensul at the 70th Annual Meeting of the Society in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico in March of 2010. At that time Dr. Schensul will deliver the Annual Malinowski Lecture, which will be published in Human Organization, the Society’s primary publication.

Established by the Society in 1973, the annual Bronislaw Malinowski Award honors the lifetime achievements of an outstanding social scientist dedicated to the goal of resolving human problems through the application of the social sciences. Previous award recipients have included Gunnar Myrdal, Edward Spicer, Margaret Clark, Alexander Leighton, Carlos Velez-Ibanez, Bea Medicine, and Orlando Fals Borda.

Over the past 35 years, Dr. Schensul has been engaged in the development of community research organizations committed to addressing issues of health disparities and cultural marginalization. From 1978 to 1987, she was co-founder and deputy director of the Hispanic Health Council, an applied research organization serving Latinos in Connecticut, where she developed its research infrastructure and approaches to intervention research and training. She then served as founding executive director of The Institute for Community Research, an applied research organization working in the U.S., Latin America, China and India. Under Dr. Schensul’s leadership, ICR became a national model for applied, community-based research, providing an example of successful community-to-university collaboration, which has since become the norm in public health and service learning. After 17 years as executive director she shifted her role to senior scientist in 2004, continuing her program of research and training in the U.S. and India. Dr. Schensul has been awarded many NIH and other grants and has written extensively about collaborative
research, culturally specific interventions, ethnography and other applied research methods, and the democratization of research for social change. Her published work includes 72 articles in peer reviewed journals, 7 special issues of peer reviewed journals, 8 authored or edited books, including the well-known Ethnographer’s Toolkit, and 17 book chapters.

Dr. Schensul earned a doctoral degree in anthropology from the University of Minnesota in 1974. Her earliest work involved research on public education in the Puerto Rican, Mexican and south side African American communities of Chicago. She has held visiting faculty appointments at the University of Kentucky, the University of
Connecticut and the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a research affiliate at Yale University with the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS, and an adjunct professor at the University of Connecticut.

Dr. Schensul has held several elected leadership positions in prominent professional associations, such as President of the Council on Anthropology and Education (1982-4) and President of the Society for Applied Anthropology (1995-7). In 2006 she was elected to the Long Range Planning Committee of the American Anthropological Association. She has been actively involved in other applied social science organizations, including the American Public Health Association, the Society for Prevention Research, the Gerontological Association of America, the American Psychological Association and the Society for Community Research in Action.

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The Institute for Community Research is an independent, nonprofit organization that conducts applied research and community enhancement programs to promote equal access to health, education, and cultural resources.