ABOUT

I am committed to advancing health equity and improving health systems. I earned a PhD in the UCSF-UC Berkeley joint program in medical anthropology (2018), and I completed postdoctoral training in anthropology and global health at The Graduate Institute in Geneva, Switzerland (2018-22).

My research aims to counter structural processes that reinforce marginalization. My current projects aim to improve health outcomes associated with cannabis policy, forced displacement, and transactional sex.

I am currently a Research Scientist at the Public Health Institute in Berkeley, CA; and a Resident Scholar at the Berkeley Center for Social Medicine.

Publications

My research has been published in several leading academic journals in the fields of anthropology, global public health, and the social sciences of medicine, including: AIDS and Behavior (2020); Global Public Health (2019, 2021); HIV Medicine (2023); Journal of the International AIDS Society (2020); Medicine, Anthropology, Theory (2021); and Social Anthropology (2021). I contributed to two edited books exploring the social aspects of sexual and reproductive health technologies, Remaking HIV Prevention in the 21st Century (Bernays et al., 2021); and Technologies of Reproduction Across the Lifecourse (Boydell & Dow, 2022).

I also authored the first dissertation in the social sciences of medicine exploring how the development and implementation of novel biomedical methods to prevent HIV impacted the intimate lives of marginalized populations in the United States: “Intimate Innovation: A Novel Method to Prevent HIV” (University of California, 2018).

You can review some of my recent publications linked below:

How the politics of intimate relationships structure innovation

In this chapter, I argue the politics of intimate relationships structure innovation for sexual and reproductive health technologies. I present three case studies that explore how national political concerns surrounding maternal intentions and the race of sexual women shape the production of sexual and reproductive health technologies. The products I examine are: GONAL-F, a subcutaneous…
COVID-19 and the political geography of racialisation

The COVID-19 pandemic has overwhelmed health systems around the globe, and intensified the lethality of social and political inequality. In the United States, where public health departments have been severely defunded, Black, Native, Latinx communities and those experiencing poverty in the country’s largest cities are disproportionately infected and disproportionately dying. Based on our collective ethnographic…
Revealing truth through diagnostics

This article examines the changing role of ‘confessional technologies’ (Foucault 1990) over the history of the HIV pandemic, beginning when US public health departments first rolled out testing campaigns and continuing in the present day through the expansion of diagnostic practices to support the development and implementation of pharmaceutical technologies for HIV prevention. Across this…