Conference Talks

2013	"Beyond Crime and Punishment: The Public Health Risk of Mass Incarceration.” Police, Prisons, and Power: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Criminal Justice. The CUNY Prison Studies Group. New York, NY. April 12.

2012	"Biopassports for Border Control: The UK Human Provenance Project." American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting. San Francisco, CA. November 14.

2012	“The Digitization of Life Itself: Bodily Knowledge in the Genomic Era.” The History of the Body. Graduate Conference. Washington University in St. Louis. October 27.

2012	“Body Digital: Medical Knowledge in the Era of DIY Genomics.” Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Medicine. Graduate Conference. Yale University. October 6.

2012	“Neglected Diseases of the Bottom Billion.” With Karolina Maciag, Jennifer Manne, and Joel Miller. Science in the News Series. Harvard Medical School. May 16.

2012	“Wailing to the Rain: Social Violence and the Condemned.” Media presentation. LA Riots Conference: Twenty Years Later. Harvard University. April 28.

2012	“DNA Polygraphs in Asylum Politics: Genetic Testing and Refugee Family Reunification.” Tracing Documents. Graduate Student Conference. Johns Hopkins University. April 21.

2012	"Border Police, MD: Medical Actors and Asylum Politics. STGlobal 12th Annual Conference on Science & Technology in Society. American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, DC. March 30.

2010	“Tragic Genetics: Ethnic Proofs, DNA Testing, and Asylum Politics.” Ethical Itineraries of Science & Medicine: Cultural & Technology in a Global World. Harvard University. December 1, 2010. Discussant: Michael D. Jackson, Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School.

I am a lecturer and founding co-director of the Master of Science in Media, Medicine, and Health Program at Harvard Medical School. You can learn more about our program here: https://ghsm.hms.harvard.edu/education/master-science-media-medicine-and....

As well, I serve as the HMS Department of Global Health and Social Medicine's inaugural writer-in-residence, selected by Dr. Paul Farmer. I am also Associate Director of the Media and Medicine certificate program and an Associate of the Department of Anthropology at Harvard.

I hold a master's and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard, where I completed an ethnography of pediatric palliative care under the direction of Dr. Arthur Kleinman and Dr. Paul Farmer. I also have a master's in Religion, Ethics, and Politics from Harvard Divinity School, and a B.A. in Philosophy from Pennsylvania State University.

I have written more than one hundred reported pieces and commentaries. My work has investigated how racial residential segregation becomes embodied as illness and disease, structural violence and the war on drugs, and the politics of health care in the United States. My writing has appeared in VICE, GQ, The Atlantic, Esquire, The New Republic, The New York Times, Men’s Health, The Guardian, Slate, and The Nation, and has been featured by MSNBC, NPR, HuffPost Live, BET, and Big Think, among others.

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