Professor Kendall is an applied medical anthropologist. He studies health inequalities and care-seeking among populations made vulnerable by poverty, ethnicity, gender and sexual identity, and by stigmatizing diseases. He has worked in more than 40 countries on topics including childhood diarrhea, care-seeking, vitamin A deficiency, malaria, dengue, leprosy, and HIV. Professor Kendall is especially interested in the surveillance methods used to collect information about diseases, especially stigmatized diseases. He is a Fulbright Senior Scholar, CNPq Senior Scientist and recipient of a Science without Frontiers award from the Brazilian government to bring graduate and post-doctoral students to Tulane. He has worked with colleagues at the Federal University of Ceara and in the Fortaleza health system for more than 10 years.
Professor Kendall pioneered rapid assessment methods in child health programs in 1983 with the World Health Organization's Diarrheal Diseases Control Program. Since then, he has taught qualitative research methods at the Bloomberg Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. He has more than 140 publications in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
