Laura Sikstrom

Dr. Laura Sikstrom is a medical anthropologist who uses anthropological theories and methods to study biomedicine in Malawi and Canada. Much of her previous research involved two years of ethnographic fieldwork on Malawi’s National Paediatric HIV treatment program. This research had dual overarching objectives – to investigate the causes behind low paediatric HIV-treatment uptake and to analyse how children with HIV were identified using a clinical algorithm. More recently, Sikstrom pushed this work in novel directions to examine new social and biomedical technologies intended to increase treatment adherence in children– peer support workers and viral load testing.

Most of her ongoing research examines new healthcare opportunities and risks that emerge alongside innovations in Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning. Concerns about AI applications systematically discriminating against specific populations have spearheaded an urgent conversation about notions of fairness. Namely, who will/should benefit the most from these techniques and why? Her ongoing CIHR-funded institutional ethnography at CAMH explores how human actors (computational scientists, clinicians and patients) engage with competing claims to fairness. For example, what makes training datasets “fair” (or unbiased and representative) and how is an ethos of fair treatment incorporated into decision-making by human (patients, clinicians, data scientists) and non-human (AI) care teams? This project aims to foster the responsible interpretation of knowledge derived from AI/ML and is essential to ensure that policy uptake is relevant and beneficial for all.

A second major project was recently funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant for research on what she calls “Predictive Care.” Predictive care is an approach to medicine driven by advances in Artificial Intelligence (e.g. Machine Learning or ML). This data-driven approach combines Big Data (data on whole populations) and Small Data (data on any single person) to facilitate more proactive, precise and personalized, care. Working collaboratively with data scientists, psychiatrists, nurses and a bioethicist, Sikstrom’s team will examine how these advances are transforming how we define, conceptualize and problematize care within an acute psychiatric in-patient setting (the Emergency Department at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health). Specifically, by drawing on anthropological theories of care and algorithms we are piloting and disseminating an interdisciplinary approach to Big Data at CAMH.

Dr. Sikstrom also teaches a wide range of courses in the Department of Anthropology, including Childhood and Childcare, Global Health, Anthropology in Action and Medical Anthropology and Social Justice.