Sonia Rupcic (she/her) is an Advanced Fellow at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion at the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System. She is an applied medical anthropologist and ethnographer with training in public health. At the VA, she contributes to research examining the impact of legal problems on health equity. Sonia’s work focuses on researching and developing interventions to mitigate the harmful effects of civil-legal issues for veterans who experience intimate partner violence.
Her VA research portfolio builds on her dissertation research, which explored the intersections of medicine, law, and justice, with a focus on medical-legal services provided in the aftermath of gender-based violence in South Africa. For this research, she conducted 22 months of ethnographic fieldwork in South African clinics and criminal courtrooms. Her published work appears in American Anthropologist, Feminist Anthropology, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and South African Crime Quarterly, contributing to scholarship on the practice of transformative justice.
Sonia received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 2020 and her M.P.H. from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in 2011.