I am an ethnographer of science and medicine. My research explores how time, political economy, and biomedical infrastructures shape unequal experiences of illness and care. I theorize asynchronized care, the temporal misalignments between clinical, bureaucratic, and economic systems that produce suffering and restrict access to treatment. Drawing on ethnographic research in Colombia and the United States, I show how these temporal structures become embodied, influencing medical outcomes and the possibilities for scientific and clinical collaboration.
My book, Cancer Intersections (University of California Press), winner of the 2024 Arthur Rubel Book Prize, examines how Colombia’s market-based health system creates delays that reshape oncology care. It reveals how social class organizes access to time itself: while affluent patients encounter biomedicine’s demand for rapid intervention, low-income patients face delays that render the pursuit of care a second illness.
My current projects extend these themes to Oklahoma and Colombia, including a collaborative bioethnography of chronic stress, inflammation, and epigenetic aging among low-income communities in Oklahoma City. By integrating ethnography with biological sampling, this work seeks to investigate how social and biological processes jointly shape health futures.
Across all my work, I analyze how temporal infrastructures govern health, science, and care—and how people labor to build livable futures within increasingly unstable systems.
