I am a sociocultural anthropologist focused on reproduction, gender and environmental health. My approach combines social studies of science with medical anthropology and environmental humanities.

My first single-authored book, In/Fertile Environments: a study of epigenetic toxicology in five parts, explores how toxicologists in China materialize and reimagine the environment through epigenetic research on men's reproductive health. Under contract at Duke University Press and anticipated in 2022, the book explores the national, hormonal, dietary, maternal and laboratory environments to discuss how scientists and activists make sense of the increasingly toxic worlds in which they live. Based on fieldwork conducted in Nanjing during a time when protecting the natural environment was not explicitly a part of everyday concerns, but the amount of toxic exposures faced by people in China was clearly growing, my research approaches reproductive toxicity as a flawed but persuasive lens through which toxicologists and others make sense of the embodied and potentially inheritable consequences of political-economic policies and distributed social hierarchies.

In addition to the book I have published related peer-reviewed articles in Cultural Anthropology (about variations in epigenetic understanding of personhood and the "maternal environment"), Cross Currents (about the harm of endocrine disrupting chemicals reimagined through environmental hormones (huanjing jisu), and forthcoming in Medical Anthropology Quarterly on the increasingly common idea of "Passing Down Pollution". I have also contributed to various online forums on the topic, including Somatosphere, Fieldsights post, and this CA author interview. I also wrote a short, personal essay on gender and toxicity for Environmental History as part of a forum called "Of Perpetrators and Victims," which was published in July 2021.

I am part of a collaborative research effort around the theme Reproducing the Environment, co-organized with Katharine Dow from University of Cambridge. We are exploring how reproductive technologies (broadly defined) are used to mitigate environmental problems, as well as questions about how and why environmental issues are often framed through questions of reproduction and future generations. We have published a book review essay on reproductive environmental justice entitled "Situating Kinmaking and the Population 'Problem'," in Environmental Humanities. The Reproducing the Environment initiative is now being conducted in conjunction with the Wellcome Trust funded Changing In/Fertilities project, of which I am a network participant, in particular its (In)fertile Environments sub-group.

I am also a participant in the Wellcome Trust funded Biosocial Birth Cohort Research Network (BBCR), which examines and utilizes birth cohort studies as reflexive method, and working lead organizer of the network, Dr. Sahra Gibbon, on questions of integernational ethnography. I recently published an essay on this topic at Somatosphere, and am co-editing a special issue to be published by Medical Anthropology Quarterly in December 2021, called Towards Intergenerational Ethnography.

I am currently conductory exploratory research on two projects: The first thinks through the recent rise in "sensory processing disorders" - defined and diagnosed by a number of actors from occupational therapists to nueroscientists, to nuerodiverse individuals themselves. I am especially interested in gendered and racialized questions of diagnosis and treatment, as well as the technical and ethical difficulties of conducting research on environmental etiologies of SPD. The preliminary research for this project is supported by a School of Anthropology Faculty Small Grant and the University of Arizona's Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute Leveraging Award. Second, I am conducting background research on "cryoconservation" initiatives - or conservation efforts that primarily depend on technologies of cryopreservation. To be commenced when it is again safe to travel, I am especially interested in the use of reproductive technologies to conserve "nature" - defined as the egg and sperm of a vareity of species, including coral in the East China Sea. Here, the global rise of -omic understandings of egg and sperm as beings-in-relation seem to be contradicted by apocalyptic scientific imaginaries which interpret "life itself" as the future savior.

In fall of 2021 I am teaching Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (ANTH 200).