Andrea Ford is a cultural and medical anthropologist at the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society at the University of Edinburgh School of Medicine. Her research explores childbearing, periods, endometriosis, and hormones, more broadly investigating how ideas about gender, bodies, knowledge, nature, and technology shape the culture surrounding medicine and reproduction. She also practices as a birth doula and is dedicated to working towards reproductive, environmental, and social justice. 

Her books include Near Birth: Contested Values and the Work of Doulas with University of California Press (March 2025), Hormonal Theory: A Rebellious Glossary with Bloomsbury Academic, and Inflamed: A Cultural History of Endometriosis (in preparation).  

In 2024 she began a 5-year Wellcome Trust project investigating the 'FemTech' industry, including the changing relationship between public and private institutions of knowledge production and care provision, and how concerns about surveillance intersect with promissory ideas about digital health. The in-depth ethnography will involve fieldwork in Edinburgh, Silicon Valley, and a third location to be determined by the project's postdoctoral fellow. 

Dr Ford is also co-investigator on the social science work package of the multidisciplinary, 5-year EU Horizon project 'EUmetriosis' investigating barriers and enablers to self-managing endometriosis, which will encompass patient interviews and policy analysis.

She received her PhD from the University of Chicago, and MA from the University of Ghana, Legon where she was a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar. She has also worked, taught, and studied at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, the FrameWorks Institute, and the UK's National Health Service. Currently, she is a member of the UK Young Academy and is working on bridging academic and non-academic spaces for research, ideas, and cultural change.