AAA Solon T. Kimball Award

Cathleen Crain and Niel Tashima, Managing Partners of LTG Associates, Inc., honored with prestigious AAA Solon T. Kimball Award.

Cathleen Crain and Niel Tashima, Managing Partners of LTG Associates, Inc. have been named as the 2020-2021 recipients of the Solon T. Kimball Award for Public and Applied Anthropology for outstanding achievements in the development of anthropology as an applied science. Nominations recognize disciplinary path-breakers who are shaping and strengthening the discipline of Anthropology, and which honor those who might otherwise be overlooked. The following is a link to their acceptance speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9chMSWz2Kxk

The Kimball is awarded biennially to honor exemplary anthropologists for outstanding recent achievements that have contributed to the development of anthropology as an applied science, have had important impacts on public policy, and speak directly to the spirit of the award. Examples of clients for such work conducted by Crain and Tashima include the World Health Organization, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

The Kimball Award recognizes Crain and Tashima’s multi-decade work, the impressive scope of topics, and the development and implementation of new research methods and strategies to change health care policies and programs. The focus of their work has always been to affect policies and programs that shape access, appropriateness, and quality of health and human services, especially for minority, at-risk, and vulnerable populations. The award will be made at a virtual ceremony in the fall.

The Kimball Award is dedicated to Solon Toothaker Kimball, 1909-1982. He did groundbreaking anthropology work on family and community in rural Ireland and on the Navajo reservation in the American Southwest. Kimball studied social tension arising from racial segregation in 1950s Alabama and found himself labeled an “academic radical.” Niel Tashima and Cathleen Crain have also been called radical for their grounded and highly collaborative work addressing complex societal issues.

Tashima is a past president of the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology (NAPA) and has served on the AAA executive board. Crain is the current NAPA president; she led the Careers Expo for the past 14 years and was a founder of the NAPA mentor program. Crain and Tashima are both Fellows in the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA), members of the Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists (WAPA) and both are professors (professional track) in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park. LTG Associates, Inc. is a 39 year old consulting firm with a foundation in anthropology and other social sciences. LTG works locally, nationally, and globally to support the planning and provision of appropriate, accessible, and high-quality health and human services. As the oldest and largest anthropologically based consulting firm in North America, LTG provides its clients with timely, cost-effective, and customized consultations from community program design, monitoring, and evaluation, to policy research and development.