I'm a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at Princeton University. I work across medical and environmental anthropology, the anthropology of technology and design, and global Indigenous studies.

Novel government programs are demanding the participation of Indigenous communities in projects of technological innovation. While these policies promise to rectify Indigenous medical and agricultural inequalities, the scope of Indigenous dispossession in places like Taiwan far exceeds the solutions proposed by inclusive design. Seemingly progressive participatory and community-centered design programs obscure the crucial differences between statistically-driven nation-building and true Indigenous self-determination—two different quests for “self-sufficiency”—in a politically precarious contemporary Taiwan, where questions of autonomy loom large. 

Works from my dissertation project were recently honored by five Paper Prizes across disciplines for my theorizing of participation (Winner, Rudolf Wirchow Award for the Critical Anthropology of Global Health and Association for Asian Studies; Honorable Mentions, Association of Political and Legal Anthropology; David Hakken Award from the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology & Computing; Nancy Abelmann Prize from the Society for East Asian Anthropology). 

My ethnographic fieldwork—across Taiwan and China—has been supported by organizations like the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Princeton-Mellon Initiative, the Association for Asian Studies/Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, and the American Ethnological Society. I am the recipient of Princeton's Annual Graduate Teaching Award, and for 2023-2024, I was also a Visiting Researcher at Academia Sinica's Institute of Ethnology.

Prior to graduate school, I earned my BA in Anthropology from Columbia University, for which I completed an ethnographic project in Shanghai.