Michael J. Oldani

Michael J. Oldani, PhD, MS, is a trained medical anthropologist from Princeton, 2006 and Executive Director of Interprofessional Education and Practice in the Office of Health Sciences/Jacobs Medical School at the University at Buffalo/SUNY. For over two decades, he has studied care teams, cultures of pharmaceutical prescribing, and the impact of interprofessional practice and education on learners, patients, and health outcomes, beginning with Fulbright-supported ethnographic doctoral fieldwork in Canada and the US on psychiatry, pharmaceutical prescribing, and mental health in Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal families. A leader in IPE for the past decade, he has advanced clinical ethnography as both a tool when it comes to evaluating IPE and a learnable technique for enhancing patient outcomes, with team funding from HRSA and the U.S. Fulbright Program and partnerships that span Area Health Education Centers, study abroad programs in Jamaica, Nepal, and South Africa, and local patient-centered clinics. He has co-edited five special themed journal volumes, published in venues including the Journal of Interprofessional Care and Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and his forthcoming book, Tales from the Script, will be published by Duke University Press. His current work advances team-based health and social care training in marginalized Western New York communities and creates pathways for Indigenous students into the health sciences.