Starting Fall 2026, students in UC Santa Barbara's Department of Anthropology will have a new way to turn their fascination with human health into a career: the department is launching an Anthropology of Health track within its existing BA program, giving students a direct pipeline into public health, medicine, and other health professions — all through the distinctive lens of anthropology.
Why Anthropology, Why Now
Ask most people what anthropology has to do with health, and they might picture archaeologists brushing dirt off ancient bones. That's part of the story — but only part.
The new track is built on a much broader premise: that understanding human health requires understanding humans in full. Physiology matters, but so does psychological well-being. Clinical outcomes matter, but so do the health inequalities and social injustices that shape who gets sick, who gets treated, and who doesn't. And none of it can be separated from the ecological systems people live within.
"By centering health within our curriculum, this track strengthens connections across anthropology's diverse perspectives, fostering a holistic understanding of human health, well-being, and inequality."
"By centering health within our curriculum, this track strengthens connections across anthropology's diverse perspectives, fostering a holistic understanding of human health, well-being, and inequality," the department explains. Rather than creating something new from scratch, the track builds on UCSB Anthropology's already extensive health-related course offerings — organizing them into a coherent, career-oriented pathway.
Perhaps most notably, the concentration is designed to bridge anthropology's three core subfields: archaeology, sociocultural anthropology, and biological anthropology. Students won't just take a health-themed elective here and there — they'll see how bioarchaeologists studying ancient skeletons, cultural anthropologists studying living communities, and biological anthropologists studying human variation are all, in their own ways, asking the same fundamental questions about what it means to be healthy.
For students eyeing careers in medicine, public health, or allied health fields, the payoff is a rigorous, interdisciplinary foundation — one that produces practitioners who understand not just how the body works, but why health outcomes differ so dramatically across populations, places, and time periods.
The Scholar Behind the Curriculum
Leading this new track is Dr. Diana Malarchik, a bioarchaeologist joining UCSB after completing her Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis. Her path to this role reads less like a straight line and more like a career built through genuine curiosity about people.
Dr. Malarchik holds a Master of Arts in Anthropology with a focus in Biological Anthropology, and, notably, began her academic life somewhere different: a Bachelor of Arts in Secondary Education with a minor in Spanish. That early training in the classroom shows in her résumé — she brings more than a decade of teaching experience, spanning secondary education in grades 7 through 12 all the way up to university lecture halls.
But her fieldwork is where her story gets especially compelling. As a working archaeologist, Dr. Malarchik has done cultural resource management work across northern California and northern Nevada. From there, her expertise took a more solemn turn: she has worked in forensic anthropology, assisting in the humanitarian recovery efforts of victims of the Camp Fire complex — one of California's deadliest wildfires — as well as on projects recovering the remains of fallen WWII soldiers. This is anthropology in service of the living, using scientific methods to bring answers, and closure, to grieving families.
Her research specialty is dental anthropology — the study of what teeth can reveal about the people who once had them. Teeth, it turns out, are remarkable archives: they record diet, disease, developmental stress, and migration history in ways that bone often can't. Dr. Malarchik's current research applies this lens to early childhood health and life history in Historic California, using stable isotope analysis, proteomics, and trace element analysis to reconstruct how children lived, ate, and survived (or didn't) in the past.
We asked Dr. Malarchick to share her vision for the first year of the Anthropology of Health track
"Learning how different communities have and continue to understand, experience, and respond to illness can help future health professionals recognize that health is not simply biological, but is also shaped by culture, history, environment, and social circumstances."
“I envision the new ‘Health Track’ at UCSB as something that provides students, particularly those pursuing careers in medicine and other health professions, with an interdisciplinary understanding of human health. Anthropology offers the unique ability to understand the evolution of current and past diseases alongside the long-term relationship it has with humans and our health. I envision classes where students learn how diseases have emerged, changed, and persisted alongside human populations; how shifts in diet, environment, technology, urbanization, and social organization have shaped disease patterns; and how our evolutionary history continues to influence health and disease today.
A health focused anthropology track will teach students to approach health through a lens of culture, human variation, and lived experience; fostering empathy and a deeper understanding of the people they will ultimately serve. Learning how different communities have and continue to understand, experience, and respond to illness can help future health professionals recognize that health is not simply biological, but is also shaped by culture, history, environment, and social circumstances.
I believe anthropology is valuable for all undergraduates, especially for students planning to enter into health professions. Anthropology gives us the ability to understand both the biological origins of disease alongside the diverse experiences of patients. And in conjunction with medical training can contribute to more thoughtful, culturally responsive, and effective care.”
A Fitting Match
It's not hard to see why Dr. Malarchik was chosen to help shape this track. Her own career already embodies the exact synthesis the Anthropology of Health concentration is trying to teach: archaeological method, biological science, humanitarian purpose, and a career-long commitment to teaching students how to ask better questions about the human condition.
For incoming and current UCSB students, the message is clear — starting this fall, there's a new track that treats health not as a narrow biomedical subject, but as the sprawling, interconnected human story it actually is. And there's a new lecturer ready to help them explore it.
If you are a student interested in the Anthropology of Health track, visit the Current Courses page or email anth-undergradadvise@ucsb.edu.
