Alexa S. Dietrich directs the SSRC’s Scholarly Borderlands Initiative and co-directs the Program on Religion and the Public Sphere. A medical anthropologist and epidemiologist, her research examines the interdependent health of people and the environment, particularly in the context of disasters. Her book, The Drug Company Next Door: Pollution, Jobs, and Community Health in Puerto Rico (NYU Press, 2013), won the Julian Steward Award for the best book in environmental anthropology in 2015. A certified master composter, she knows a thing or two about the work of soil.