I am a sociologist specializing in global health. My research lies firmly at the intersection of medical, organizational, and transnational sociology. I primarily investigate the social meanings and power dynamics that govern transnational healthcare organizations and the construction of global health regimes. I seek to understand how different types of professionals – medical, public health, development – construct expert knowledge about illness and disease and draw upon that expertise when delivering healthcare services from the Global North to the Global South. In doing so, I uncover whether and how these professionals, with their privileged Northern status, reproduce or generate new inequalities between countries, professionals, and patients in global metropoles and peripheries. I ground my scholarship in symbolic interactionist, institutionalist, and postcolonial theories and adopt a range of methodological strategies, including ethnographic observations, interviews, and surveys, to answer my research questions.
My research has been published in Sociology of Development, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, and the Research Handbook on Health Care Policy and supported by several prestigious fellowships, including a Fulbright US Student Program Fellowship, Boren Fellowship (declined), Center for Khmer Studies US Scholar Research Fellowship, and College of Arts & Sciences Dissertation Research Fellowship.
Last year, I served as a Graduate Fellow at the Irsay Institute at Indiana University Bloomington (IUB). While conducting fieldwork in Cambodia, I was a Visiting Fellow at the Cambodia Development Resource Institute.
I am also passionate about teaching. I have taught Introduction to Sociology as an instructor of record three times and given guest lectures in lower- and upper-level sociology courses within and beyond IUB, including at the American University of Phnom Penh. I also regularly serve on undergraduate students’ honors thesis committees and mentor undergraduate and graduate students undertaking ethnographic research projects.