Priyanka Jayakodi, a fifth year PhD candidate in cultural anthropology specializing in medical and environmental anthropology, has been named the recipient of the 2026 College of Social Science Graduate Student Research Award. This award is given each year to an outstanding graduate student in the college whose research exemplifies innovative and transformative achievement in their field of study.

Priyanka’s research focuses on ecological bodily health, chronic illness, water, gender, state violence, and visual ethnography. She has presented her work at several international conferences, including the Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting, the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, and the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting.

The research recognized for this award, which is titled, “The Chronicity of Militarism: Sri Lanka’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic,” appears in the  Covid’s Chronicities: From Urgency to Stasis in a Pandemic Era (2025). It began as a class paper in her advisor Dr. Heather Howard’s Medical Anthropology (ANP 834) class.

“What started as an effort to understand how the then Sri Lankan government managed the pandemic gradually evolved through conference presentations, ethnographic fieldwork, and feedback from mentors into a published book chapter. So, for me, as a graduate student, this award is especially meaningful because it validates that long journey of developing an idea from a course paper into a published scholarly article,” Jayakodi explained.

Priyanka’s work on this paper has also been recognized by the 2022 Shao Chang Lee Best Paper Competition for graduate student papers by the MSU Asian Studies Center.

The MSU Department of Anthropology is proud to recognize Priyanka for this outstanding achievement.