I am a sociologist of science, medicine, and technology and serve as an assistant professor of sociology at Yale University. My book, Refashioning Race, uses the case of cosmetic surgery to show medical knowledge and technologies shape racial categories and the body itself. In other research projects, I investigate how technologies illuminate (and reconfigure) notions of trust and responsibility, pursuing these questions in studies of GLP-1 drugs, health wearables, and AI. A description of some of my research projects appears below.

Refashioning bodies and norms with Ozempic

I am working on a new book project on the class of drugs popularly known as Ozempic. These drugs, also known as glucagon like peptide 1 receptor agonists (GLP-1s), are currently prescribed for weight loss, diabetes, and an increasing number of other health-related conditions. In 2023, Science magazine declared GLP-1s to be the “breakthrough of the year,” citing studies reporting 15% body weight loss in individuals with obesity. My book, The Weight of Inequality, investigates the competing narratives that emerged after the approval of GLP-1s for treatment of obesity in 2021, asking: who does the American public think should be taking GLP-1s, and for what purpose? Does this matter for access to the drugs, and how?

Following GLP-1s beyond the walls of the clinic to where they are discussed, advertised, sold, and dispensed, the book draws on interviews with healthcare providers who prescribe GLP-1s, people who take GLP-1s, and people who advocate for or against them, as well as ethnographic observation of GLP-1 related events and analysis of media, advertisements, and insurance coverage deliberations. The book shows how widely circulating moral ideas about GLP-1s reflect and shape everyday life and healthcare in the U.S.

Refashioning bodies and race in cosmetic surgery

My first book, Refashioning Race: How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards (University of California Press, April 2023), argues that cosmetic surgery is a transnational racial project that makes race visual and embodied. Refashioning Race shows how cosmetic surgeons craft race at the macro, meso, and micro levels, illuminating how physicians re-shape racial categories and hierarchies. Beginning with an analysis of expert discourse at the macro level, it then compares how cosmetic surgeons discuss and enact appropriate appearances for patients in two multiracial societies: the U.S., a wealthy country with a long history of cosmetic surgery practice and research, and Malaysia, a middle income country with an emergent cosmetic surgery market. It then turns to surgeons’ interactions with patients, highlighting how specific technologies of visualization make race material. Focusing on the role of cosmetic surgeons as gatekeepers to and producers of desired appearances, Refashioning Race argues that cosmetic surgeons re-make race—literally, on patients’ body but also at the level of broader culture. The book calls for more attention to how forces and events working across the macro, meso, and micro scales converge to stabilize the continuing use of racial categories in medicine.

I have published several peer-reviewed articles about cosmetic surgery and race. In a paper in Ethnic and Racial Studies, I show how ethnic-specific beauty standards have proliferated in the U.S. By contrast, another paper traces the emergence of a pan-ethnic “Asian” beauty ideal in multiethnic, Muslim-majority Malaysia, among other options. Different racial/ethnic identities and formations emerge in interaction between cosmetic surgeons and patients. Yet at international conferences and in the pages of journals, efforts to promote transnational exchange in cosmetic surgery have led to a sedimentation of a few racial types of patients, aesthetics, and techniques. This work suggests that under medical consumerism, racial categories may take on more salience, denoting aesthetic preferences as well as perceived bodily differences.

Another paper argues that cosmetic surgeons perform forms of gendered embodied labor in order to forge strong connections with patients. And a chapter in Handbook of Beauty and Inequality (open access) gives a broader overview of cosmetic surgery and how it relates to social inequalities along the lines of race, gender, class, and nationality.

In addition, I have brought qualitative research expertise to collaborations with plastic surgeons and clinical researchers, exploring how women of color experience life after mastectomy due to breast cancer and how the history of plastic surgery, racial assimilation, and passing leaves a legacy for the present.

AI, Medicine, and Society

I am co-authoring a book on AI, Medicine, and Society with Xenophon Papademetris and Emily Johns (under contract with Cambridge University Press). In the book, we introduce core concepts that will help readers become critical consumers of AI in medicine. Taking a sociotechnical and systemic perspective, the book draws on historical and contemporary examples to show how healthcare organizations, governments, technology manufacturers and others shape how technologies like medical AI are designed, evaluated, and used. Our fundamental contention is that many of the debates about the use of AI in medicine have happened before and that we can learn from them.

This book and a series of articles were informed by a National Science Foundation-funded project on Policy Design for Holding AI-Supported Systems Accountable (2021-2025), for which I was PI and social science lead. As society has become increasingly excited about and dependent on AI software systems, questions arise about how such software can be developed responsibly, particularly in health contexts. In collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of researchers from computer science, public health/medicine, and biomedical engineering, I have written on how communication and concerns can be conveyed across the lines of computer science and social science, what actionable policy and guidance around transparency might look like (in line with current capabilities and techniques in explainable AI), and how analogues like informed consent in clinical communication yield insight into what information should be provided to end users about AI systems and for which purposes. The project facilitates interactions between policy makers and software engineers in understanding capabilities and societal expectations toward forming policy goals and connecting policy to specific quality-assurance obligations for regulatory purposes.

In addition, using interviews with software developers, regulators, clinicians, and patients/users, as well as historical and technical analysis and experiments, we investigate how stakeholders weigh risks, benefits, and trust with regard to specific AI-supported software systems. And our team is conducting controlled experiments on how differing requirements for transparency (and specifically, explainability) affect the explanations for black-boxed AI systems provided by software developers.

Past Projects

I have contributed my qualitative research expertise and insights from my sociological research in collaboration with computer scientists and clinicians like plastic surgeons and dermatologists. I have written about how online reviews diminish physician authority despite their largely positive content. In a study of patient attitudes toward the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in skin cancer screening, we found that patients were most receptive to AI-assistance in diagnosis within the context of a physician-patient relationship.

I was part of a collaborative survey research project that examines public attitudes toward COVID-19 mitigation efforts in Southeast Asia, headed by Prof. Sulfikar Amir. Results suggested that despite the challenges posed by the ongoing pandemic in 2021, workers in the informal sector in Indonesia show higher social resilience relative to other socioeconomic groups.