Surviving against the OddsPresident Barack Obamas mother, S. Ann Dunham, was an economic anthropologist and rural development consultant who worked in several countries including Indonesia. Dunham received her doctorate in 1992. She died in 1995, at the age of 52, before having the opportunity to revise her dissertation for publication, as she had planned. Dunhams dissertation adviser Alice G. Dewey and her fellow graduate student Nancy I. Cooper undertook the revisions at the