Jennifer Miller-Thayer, PhD
Anthropology Faculty and Honors Transfer Program Coordinator
jmillerthayer@citruscollege.edu
(626) 852-8086
CI 247
Dr. Jennifer Miller-Thayer is a four-field trained anthropologist (cultural, biological, and linguistic anthropology and archaeology) focusing on cultural and medical subfields, with training and experience in applied anthropology as well. She began her college career at Pasadena City College, then transferred to California State University, Los Angeles where she completed her bachelor of arts and master of arts in cultural anthropology. Her master's thesis explored Chinese American elder care in the San Gabriel Valley in order to understand the challenges faced by the Chinese American community in providing safe, good quality care for their elder family members. She attended a joint medical anthropology program at University of California, San Francisco/University of California, Berkeley for a year and trained in theory and methods for medical anthropology, then transferred to University of California, Riverside where she graduated with her Ph.D. in December 2010. Her dissertation topic was cross-border healthcare at the United States-Mexican border where she examined the practice of U.S. residents going to Mexico for various types of medical and dental care they could not access in the U.S.
Dr. Miller-Thayer has extensive college teaching experience spanning more than 12 years at various colleges and universities prior to coming to Citrus College, including UC Riverside, Mount San Jacinto College, Chaffey College, and CSU San Bernardino where she was nominated for the "Lecturer of the Year Award" in 2013-2014. She was very excited to join the faculty at Citrus College as a full-time professor in fall 2015. In 2019, Dr. Miller-Thayer became a tenured faculty member. She taught study abroad for the first time in Costa Rica in winter 2020. She is scheduled to teach study abroad in Paris, France in a future winter term. After teaching honors courses for some 16 years and serving as the Honors Transfer Program Advisory Committee chair for three years, she became the honors transfer program coordinator in fall 2021.
