I am a Co-Director of Education and an Assistant Professor of Bioethics at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine and an Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Sociology at Temple University. My research explores the intersection of immigration, health, incarceration, and medical education. My work has been published in Social Science & Medicine, Social Forces, The American Journal of Bioethics, The British Medical Journal, Medical Education, and City & Community. My current book project, Mexican Chicago: Between Belonging and Exclusion, draws on five years of ethnographic fieldwork with a socially similar group of children of immigrants—some undocumented, some citizen-born—to examine how legal status shapes belonging, access, and identity in contemporary urban life.
Broadly, my research asks: What happens to health and healthcare when legal status becomes a master status? How do immigration policy and the absence of reform since 1986 shape the lives—and the health—of over ten million undocumented people in the United States? I aim to illuminate how citizenship operates as a social determinant of health and to advocate for more ethical, inclusive healthcare systems and research practices.
Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Health Disparities Research Scholars Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2020–2021) and a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA (2018–2020). I earned my Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2018.
I am a 2024–2025 Public Policy Lab Fellow at Temple University. During this fellowship, I am exploring how state policy and local context influence immigrant health, with particular attention to the pre-, peri-, and postnatal experiences of undocumented individuals across different regions in the U.S.
I consider teaching in a medical school to be both a privilege and great joy. I strive to be a thoughtful, reflexive, and caring educator, committed to teaching future health professionals about the social determinants of health, doctor-patient communication, health equity, immigration, and access. In Spring 2024, I received the LKSOM Educational Excellence Award in Graduate/Non-MD Professional Program Teaching—a recognition of the energy and care I bring to my teaching and mentorship.