Patricia Tovar, an associate professor, earned her doctorate in anthropology from CUNY in 1995, with the dissertation “Tales of Love and Death: The Lives of Portuguese Widows.” She was a MAGNET Postdoctoral Fellow at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and the coordinator of the CUNY PIPELINE Program. She has been the recipient of a Wenner-Gren Foundation Fieldwork Grant, a Ledig House Writers Residency, and many other fellowships and awards. Her research interests have focused on the study of widowhood, mobility, forced displacement, violence, sexual and reproductive health, and gender and science. She has conducted field work in Colombia, Ecuador, Portugal, and the United States. She came to John Jay from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, and until 2006 she was the head of the Social Anthropology section of the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History. Her recent major publications include Las viudas del conflicto armado en Colombia and Familia, género y Antropología en Colombia. She has published extensively on the consequences of armed conflict on women’s lives, the impact of new reproductive technologies for women, the construction of medical discourses and cosmetic alterations of the female body, and on why women lag far behind men in science and technology. She is the co-chair of the Latin American Studies Association, and has been a consultant for the Organization of Iberoamerican States and the Panamanian Science and Technology Secretariat.