J. Barry Gurdin, Ph.D. has been a professor and/or lecturer in the social sciences at universities and colleges in the United States of America, Canada, and Sweden
Barry has been a visiting scholar/research associate at the University of California, Berkeley. As an active writer and researcher, he has composed novels, newspaper and magazine articles, grants, business proposals, legal and technical documents. He has also translated French and Swedish, and edited books by important authors.
As a clinical and applied sociologist and anthropologist, Joseph Barry Gurdin has counseled hundreds of poly-drug substance abusers, many of whom have co-occurring disorders (also known as being “dual diagnosis”) and are HIV+ or have AIDS. He has done data analysis and management on a variety of projects, and has done studies involving surveys and interviews with patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Schlerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease).
Barry has had contracts with market research firms for which he investigated customer loyalty in the pharmaceutical, biotechnological, and contract research organizations and psychiatrists’ prescribing various medications in their practices. Dr. Gurdin presented an ethnography based on his doing a two year participant observatory study of the spiritual group of recent immigrants to the USA at annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Pacific Division and a related paper at the American Sociological Association, and published a summative article on this fieldwork in a newspaper well-known in the literary world of New York. This same contract required him to organize two international conferences of major public intellectuals who appear in a recent full-length popular feature film, and between two and five hundred individuals appeared at each of four events in the Bay Area. For this work, he introduced these figures to the audiences, interviewed a physicist at NASA, wrote a related university course, and grant proposals.
His work as a research scientist is acknowledged in a recent book, and he is the first author on eight chapters in Model Programs for Adolescent Sexual Health Evidence-Based HIV, STI, and Pregnancy Prevention Interventions, edited by Josefina J. Card and Tabitha Benner (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 2008). Barry has also done interventions with university students with learning difficulties, and his assistance has enabled them to complete their course work.
Joseph Barry Gurdin’s novel, Border of Lilies and Maples is available through many stores on the web, and is stocked at such stores as Black Oak Books in Berkeley, CA, and Bookshop West Portal in San Francisco. His readings have been announced in the Literary Guides of the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, and other media. His novel is also available at the Main Public Libraries of San Francisco and Berkeley, California, and other libraries.
You can reach Barry at gurdin@hotmail.com.