I am a sociologist specializing in health, organizations, and development subfields. My research primarily investigates the social meanings and power dynamics that govern transnational healthcare organizations and the construction of global health regimes. I seek to understand how transnational healthcare professionals and volunteers deploy different types of expertise in healthcare delivery. I am particularly interested in the privilege that healthcare professionals from the Global North have in producing knowledge in the international aid sector, as well as the ways in which aid organizations harness expertise to fulfill their missions. I ground my scholarship in symbolic interactionist and institutionalist 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.
I am currently a Graduate Fellow at Indiana University Bloomington’s Irsay Institute and was previously a Visiting Fellow at the Cambodia Development Resource Institute in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.