I study how law, institutions, and inequality shape health, healthcare, and medical training.
I am Co-Director of Education at the Center for Health Justice and Bioethics and Assistant Professor at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University, with an affiliate appointment in the Department of Sociology. I am also a Macy Faculty Scholar, a national program supporting early-career faculty who show strong promise as future leaders in health professions education.
My research sits at the intersection of immigration, incarceration, and medical education, with particular attention to how law and policy shape clinical care and health outcomes. My work has appeared in Social Science & Medicine, Social Forces, The American Journal of Bioethics, The Journal of the American Dental Association, The BMJ, Medical Education, and City & Community.
Broadly, my scholarship asks what happens to health and healthcare when legal status becomes a master status. The United States has not passed meaningful immigration reform since 1986, and I examine how that absence shapes the lives, and the health, of more than ten million undocumented people, and how citizenship itself operates as a determinant of health. Across this work I aim to build more ethical and inclusive systems of care and research, particularly for people navigating legal precarity.
Before Temple, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Health Disparities Research Scholars Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Fielding School of Public Health at UCLA. I earned my PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago and was a Public Policy Lab Fellow at Temple, where I studied how state and local policy environments shape immigrant health.
Teaching in a medical school is both a privilege and a genuine joy. I am committed to a reflexive pedagogy that prepares future clinicians to take the social determinants of health seriously: doctor–patient communication, health equity, immigration, and access to care. In Spring 2024 I received the Lewis Katz School of Medicine Educational Excellence Award for teaching in graduate and non-MD professional programs.