Faculty Spotlight: Katharina Rynkiewich, Ph.D.

Every year, about 700,000 people die from antibiotic resistant infections — and that number could jump to 10 million by 2050, according to an international report by the United Nations and global health agencies. In fact, according to Katharina Rynkiewich, Ph.D., “There is a threat of apocalyptic times when there's no antibiotic option to be given for some of these highly resistant bacterial infections.”

Rynkiewich, a new assistant professor in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, is an anthropologist of health and medicine, who studies the social and cultural dynamics of antibiotic prescribing practices in the U.S. “My research has been based in U.S. hospitals and health care systems, looking at different types of medical specialists and asking questions about why they use antibiotics in a particular way,” she said.

The potential problem with a reliance on antibiotics is two-fold, she said. At the individual level it can cause adverse side-effects, such as antibiotic-related diarrhea or the drug becoming less effective over time. At a societal level, as previously mentioned, it can lead to wide-spread death due to antibiotic-resistant infection, particularly from bacteria such as Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacterales, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and Clostridioides difficile, which causes diarrhea and inflammation of the colon.

The Centers for Disease Control has guidelines detailing best practices for responsible antibiotic use, Rynkiewich said. Based on her research, she found those guidelines are interpreted differently depending on the type of provider, such as infectious disease doctors, surgeons and intensive care unit practitioners.

Rynkiewich said she always wanted to be an anthropologist, having grown up overseas and being exposed to different cultural norms. But she wasn’t sure of the specific subfield. However, after spending a summer as an intern with an infectious disease doctor in a rural Midwestern hospital, her passion became clear, she said. “He was just this one guy who was trying to bring all the antibiotic use in the health care system more into line with what he felt was appropriate. And so, he often would go to bat for reducing antibiotic use and I got to see the ways that he would try to convince other physicians of the importance,” she said. “It was fascinating.”

Before FAU, Rynkiewich earned her master’s degree in social sciences from the University of Chicago and her doctoral degree in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. She then worked as a postdoctoral scholar in the department of anthropology at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio until moving to Boca Raton in 2022.

Rynkiewich plans to expand her work to establish an ethnography and qualitative data analysis lab to examine the relationship of intersecting concerns with crises among humans and the environment. That might mean looking at how antibiotics end up in our water or soil, and the impact on people, for instance.

She said she hopes her research raises awareness of antibiotic use. “We need to be level-headed about antibiotic use. There are some cases in which it's really needed, and there are some cases in which it's definitely unnecessary,” she said. “Getting the word out about that is very important for me.”