I am a sociocultural anthropologist who focuses on the anthropology of science & technology with an emphasis on reproduction, gender and the environment. My dissertation (UC Berkeley 2013) investigated the relationship between reproductive and environmental health in China, especially as it relates to epigenetic research on male infertility. My book manuscript in progress, Infertile Futures: Producing and Reproducing the Chinese Environment, builds on this dissertation to explore how multiple environments of toxic exposure are brought into being at various scales through the scientific practices of reproductive toxicologists, who both examine and produce the toxic environments of exposure they research. The project explores the connections epigenetic toxicological research makes between economic, industrial and human development, examining the role of toxins in the imagination and materialization of scientific and reproductive futures.

Currently I am working on two related projects. The first is a collaborative research effort around the theme Reproducing the Environment. Together with Katharine Dow from University of Cambridge I have organized conference panels that bring together research on the use of reproductive technologies to mitigate environmental problems, as well as questions about how and why environmental issues are often framed through questions of reproduction and future generations. I co-organized a workshop on this theme in June 2016 at University of Cambridge, sponsored by the Reproductive Sociology Research Group and the Centre for Research on the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). See http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/26944 for further information. An edited volume based on the workshop is forthcoming, and will feature an article version of my paper: Swimming in Poison, Queering Toxicity: Gender Benders in China.

My new research project continues at the intersection of reproductive and environmental health, focusing on the use of reproductive technologies by coral conservation programmes. Coral gametes, like the eggs and sperm of other endangered species, are being frozen in order to preserve the possibility of future resurrection. A study of these practices will address the extent to which problems of the environment and reproduction often transcend formalized political, national and gender boundaries. This is especially true of coral, whose sex exceeds male/female categories and whose territory are dispersed throughout disputed waters such as the South China Sea. I will start this research by conducting fieldwork in London, England this summer, with the goal of eventually doing fieldwork in Taiwan. This project thinks through how "cyroconservation" falls into a long line of reprotech projects that claim to offer bio-technological solutions to complex social and environmental problems. It also expands on questions of how the intentional intertwining of biology and technology has become vital to human and non-human fertility conservation projects. As a part of the initial stages of this research I will be presenting on an Executive Session at the 2017 AAA Meeting in Washington DCs called: How Anthropology Matters in the Anthropocene: Understanding the Cultures and Politics of Climate Change Denial, during which I will present a paper tilted Banking on Denial.

Finally, I have recently completed work on the Routledge Handbook of Genomics, Health and Society which I co-edited with Sahra Gibbon, Barbara Prainsack and Stephen Hillgartner. The Handbook provides an overview of classic and emergent topics in the social studies of genomics. My contributions to the volume include organizing the section Crossing Boundaries - which features Margaret Lock, Amber Benezra, Carrie Friese and others -  and a single-authored chapter, called Gendered Bioeconomies. The Handbook will be published in January of 2018. More information, including a full table of contents, is available here.