Dr. Deborah R. Gordon, Consultant for the Center for Social Epidemiology, is a medical anthropologist who has conducted anthropological research in health care settings since l970, in the United States, Israel, and since 1984, in Italy. She is currently an adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology, History, and Medicine at UC San Francisco. Beginning in 2001, her ethnographic focus turned to work and health in a project lead by Prof. Paul Blanc, with particular interest in American hospital workers at the bottom of the ‘pecking order.’ In 2003 she began research with opinion leaders around work and health in California, which lead to the organization of a California Forum on “The Way we Work and its Impact on our Health”.