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Sandra Bärnreuther is an assistant professor (tenure-track) at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Lucerne. Her teaching and research interests revolve around the fields of medical anthropology, anthropology of science, political anthropology, and digital anthropology. 

In her current project she examines transformations in India’s primary healthcare sector through processes of digitalization and financialization. Here, concerns about universal health coverage and access to care intersect with broader questions about health financing, data-driven development, and digital modes of health governance. 

Sandra Bärnreuther is the author of “Substantial Relations: Making Global Reproductive Medicine in Postcolonial India,” a historically-informed ethnography of IVF in India. Thinking through substances—metaphorically and materially—the book provides an analysis of the various relations that the burgeoning IVF sector in India has relied on and generated. In this way, it contributes to a broader understanding of reproductive medicine as a global phenomenon constantly in the making, situating India in the midst of, rather than peripheral to, this process.

After studying at several universities in Germany, India, and the USA, Sandra Bärnreuther received her PhD from the South Asia Institute and the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” at the University of Heidelberg. She has taught at Heidelberg, the University of Chicago and the University of Zurich, and been a visiting researcher at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Oxford, and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. She is currently a member of the Swiss Young Academy.

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