Allison Hopkins
  • Associate Professor
  • Director of Undergraduate Studies
  • Food, Nutrition, and Culture Bridging Theme Committee Chair
  • Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
  • Phone: 979-862-9179
  • Email: hopkins@tamu.edu
  • Office: Anthropology 309H
  • Document: CV
Research Areas
  • Cultural Anthropology

Biography

Courses Taught:

    • ANTH 205 – Peoples and Cultures of the World
    • ANTH 210 – Social and Cultural Anthropology
    • ANTH 426 – Anthropology of Food and Nutrition
    • ANTH 430 – Applied Anthropology
    • ANTH 435 – Medical Anthropology
    • ANTH 437 – Ethnobotany 
    • ANTH 642 – Research Design in Anthropology

Current Graduate Students:

  • Arik Bord
  • Hyein Kim

Research Interests

Specialty:

Health and wellbeing, ethnobotany, globalization, social networks, knowledge transmission, mixed-methods, Latin America and Latinos in U.S.

Current Research Projects:

  • I'm a medical and ecological anthropologist specializing in interdisciplinary research on the connections between globalization, social relationships, and human health. Specifically, I focus on understanding people's knowledge about local resources, how that knowledge relates to their behavior, what factors are associated with variation in their knowledge and behavior, and ultimately how that relates to health. I have and continue to research these issues in varying contexts, with different populations, types of knowledge, and factors at play. The theoretical and methodological approaches I use in my research are varied and depend on the research question and the strengths of the research team. 

  • My current research projects include a longitudinal study examining the change in herbal remedy knowledge over the last 15 years in a rural Yucatec Maya community and a cross-cultural survey of local definitions of wellbeing in Italy and Mexico. I'm also collaborating with colleagues on an NIH-funded study designed to capture the composition and changes in the social networks of recently quit smokers in the United States, how their networks relate to their ability to stay quit, and how information on smoking cessation spreads through their networks.

  • I welcome inquiries from potential graduate students interested in research topics closely related to mine. I also have opportunities for undergraduate students to carry out research with me. The students gain hands-on experience working in my Planetary Health Laboratory with various aspects of the research process, including grant and manuscript writing, data collection instrument development, and data collection and analysis. The Planetary Health Laboratory is where my team researches the interconnections between people's health and their environment at all scales.

Educational Background

  • PhD, University of Florida, 2009

Selected Publications

    • Hopkins, A.L., Muramoto, M.L., McCarty, C., Kim, H., Swiney, S., Allen, A., Nair, U., and T. Connolly. (2023) Personal network changes among smoking relapse prevention intervention participants. American Journal of Health Behavior 47(5):958-964.  
    • Hopkins, A.L., Gibbes, C., Clement, V., Inurreta, A.F., Reyes Can, A. and J. Jimenez-Osornio. (Published online in 2023) Analysis of sub-national variation in global development goals to inform locally relevant sustainable development. Environment, Development and Sustainability. 

    • Athreya, S. and A.L. Hopkins. (2021) Conceptual issues in hominin taxonomy: Homo heidelbergensis and an ethnobiological reframing of species. Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 175(Suppl. 72): 4-26.

    • Muramoto, M., Hopkins, A.L., Bell, M., Allen, A., Nair, and T. Connolly. (2021) Results of a feasibility study of Helpers Stay Quit Training for smoking relapse prevention. Nicotine & Tobacco Research 23(4): 711-715.

    • Gibbes, C., Hopkins, A., Inurreta, A. and J. Jimenez Osornio. (2020) Defining and measuring sustainability: A systematic review of studies in rural Latin America and the Caribbean. Environment, Development and Sustainability 22:447-468.

    • Hopkins, A.L., Yeoman, M. and C. Ritenbaugh. (2018) Healthy foods prepared at home: Diet and support as protective strategies during pregnancy for Hispanic women. Ecology of Food and Nutrition 57(2):140-161.

    • Hopkins, A.L., Stepp, J.R. McCarty, C. and J.S. Gordon. (2015) Herbal remedy knowledge acquisition and dissemination among the Yucatec Maya in Tabi, Mexico: A cross-sectional study. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 11:33.

    • Hopkins, A. and J.R. Stepp. (2012) Distribution of herbal remedy knowledge in Tabi, Yucatan, Mexico. Economic Botany 66(3):249-254.

    • Hopkins, A., Gibbes, C., Inurreta Diaz, A. and R. Rojas. (2012) Linking remote sensing, census, and interview data to understand forest transitions in the southern cone of the state of Yucatan, Mexico. Ethnobotany Research & Applications 10:1-13.

    • Hopkins, A. (2011) Use of network centrality measures to explain individual levels of herbal remedy cultural competence among the Yucatec Maya in Tabi, Mexico. Field Methods 23(3):307-328.