I am an Assistant Professor in the Center for Urban Bioethics at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine and an Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Sociology at Temple University.
I was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Health Disparities Research Scholars Training Program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (2020-2021). From 2018-2020 I was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA. I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago in 2018. My research, which has appeared in academic journals including Social Forces, The American Journal of Bioethics, The British Medical Journal, Medical Education and City & Community, explores issues at the intersection of healthcare and immigration reform and the importance of incorporating carceral health within med ed curricula.
The situation of the more than 10 million undocumented immigrants in the United States today represents one of the great civil rights issues of our time. My central research questions thus revolve around the increasing significance of citizenship status in immigrant lives and communities in a context where there has been a lack of comprehensive immigration reform since 1986. My current book project, tentatively entitled Mexican Chicago: Between Belonging and Exclusion, highlights these issues through a five year ethnographic examination amongst a socially similar group of children of immigrants that differ on whether or not they have citizenship.
I was recently selected by to be a Public Policy Lab Fellow at Temple University for the 2024-2025 Academic Year. During this fellowship I will be exploring the significant role state policy and local context plays in immigrant health, with particular attention to the pre, peri and postnatal experiences of undocumented people across different policy environments in the United States.
Teaching within a medical school has proven to be both a great joy and privilege and I strive to be a sensitive, caring, reflexive, and serious educator. I am constantly working to improve pedagogically and to think through the best and most effective ways/methods to teach medical students about topics including the social determinants of health, doctor patient communication, immigration, health equity, health literacy and access. This effort culminated most recently in my receiving an LKSOM Educational Excellence Award in Graduate/Non MD Professional Program Teaching in Spring 2024.