Roberto Abadie
Research Assistant Professor

I am currently a Research Assistant Professor at the Sociology Department, University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I am an anthropologist and received my Ph. D. from the Graduate Center (CUNY) with a dissertation on a group of poor research subjects making a living by selling their bodies to test new, experimental drugs, for Big Pharma in Philadelphia. My book exploring this topic “The Professional Guinea Pig: Big Pharma and the Risky World of Human Subjects” has been published by Duke University Press. My interest on how individuals understand and deal with health risk, lead me to apply social network theory towards an understanding of how social inequalities shape risk practices among intravenous drug users in rural Puerto Rico, a topic I had started explored in my native country, Uruguay almost two decades ago. Before coming to UNL, I spent some time at the Bioethics Program at the Mayo Clinic and the Biomedical Ethics Unit at McGill University. I had my fifteen minutes of media attention from venues such as Time Magazine and the BBC.
02/2017-Present
Research Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
10/2014 – 1/2017
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Department of Sociology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
02/2013-10/2014
Senior Researcher at SNRG (Social Network Research Group) and Project Director for National HIV Behavioral Surveillance HET 3 (CDC). John Jay College of Criminal Justice. (CUNY)
09/2011-09/2012
Research Associate, Biomedical Ethics Unit. Faculty of Medicine. McGill University, Montreal.
09/2009-08/2011
Visiting Scholar at the Doctoral Program in Public Health. Graduate Center. CUNY. New York.
10/2006-02/2008
Project Director. Native American Views on DNA Bio banking. Mayo Clinic. Rochester, MN.
“Roberto Abadie has given us a deep, complex, and profoundly disturbing investigation into the dark underside of the clinical trials industry. The Professional Guinea Pig is not just ethnography. It is a call to Action.” –Carl Elliott, author of Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream.
Waldman, M. (2010). The invisible frontline. Nature, 467 (7317), 786.
“Roberto Abadie, provides a disturbing account of volunteers’ experiences in The Professional Guinea Pig.” -Download-
Barnbaum, D. (2011). Except for all the others. Nature Medicine, 17 (5), 535.
“The Professional Guinea Pig gives voice to volunteers skeptical of the current ethical protections in phase 1 trials, even as they endure the risks of those trials.” –Download-
“Abadie argues that the professional guinea pig (paid for endurance of pain, discomfort, and the boredom related to a clinical trial) is a new occupational category in deindustrialised Philadelphia.” -Download–
Pollock, A. (2011). American Anthropologist, 113 (2), 356-357.
“The Professional Guinea Pig tells a fascinating story at the entrepreneurial and pharmaceuticalized heart of neoliberal medicine.” -Download-
Goldstein, D. (2012). American Ethnologist, 39 (4), 835-836.
“Roberto Abdie’s illuminating ethnography transports its readers to the city of Philadelphia and into the complex world of human experimentation that, despite its proximity, is invisible to most of us.” -Download-
Poplavska, E. (2011). Social Forces, 90 (1), 341-343.
“The Professional Guinea Pig offers critical tools to reflect on and understand the relationship between the commodification of human subjects in clinical trials and how participant risk is construed and managed by the subjects themselves.” -Download-
Barrett, R. (2011). Sociology of Health & Illness, 33 (5), 815-816.
“The author draws attention to the exploitation of drug trial participants and ethical concerns about their treatment.” -Download-
Nixon, A. (2013). Health, Risk & Society, 15 (8), 717-718.
“Abadie’s study is a traditional ethnography, carried out in circumstances where the researcher is aware that his work might upset powerful people.” -Download-
Montag, D. (2014). Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 28 (1), b24-b26.
“It is the first ethnographic description of its kind, focusing on “sociocultural processes that transform bodies into valuable commodities as research subjects” -Download-
This project documents how social networks shape HIV and Hepatitis C risk among injection drug users in rural Puerto Rico and ultimately, aims to use this research to reduce the spread of HIV and Hepatitis C in Puerto Rico by identifying effective prevention strategies. Between March 2015 and April 2017, we interviewed more than 460 people who inject drugs and ask them about their risk behaviors, injection risk partners, and about their lives in rural Puerto Rico. Each participant also completed a rapid HIV and Hepatitis C test. The analytical portion of the project involves simulating risk social networks on a regional scale, and testing the simulation effects of a range of interventions.
I approach teaching in much the way I approach scholarship: as an opportunity to encourage students to engage actively with academic concepts and theory and to use them to reflect and then potentially transform the world they live in. I have developed a pedagogical approach that invites students to grasp with the social and structural production of inequalities and its effects on their own personal trajectories, their families and their communities. A critical approach to health and illness represents a privileged opportunity to denaturalize the social world, for example, by showing how the way we are born, live and die are shaped not only by cultural norms but also by health disparities.
In the classroom, I attempt to create nurturing, collaborative learning environments capable of inspiring critical thinking and action. I support students’ engagement by linking discussions of academic concepts to current events, from a global health epidemics like HIV or obesity, to the intravenous drug use that ravages rural communities in the US. This process elicits students’ positionality, illuminating how race, ethnicity, gender and class contribute to certain health outcomes. While understanding how a society works is not, in itself, a transformative act, I hope that it might stimulate students to change the world around them.
“The Ethics Debate on Compensating Drug Trial Volunteers.” Anthropology News, 2:24.