I am a Member in the School of Historical Studies at the IAS. I received a PhD in the History of Science from Harvard and was an IFK postdoc at the University of Chicago.
My research explores the production and transformation of knowledge about organisms and life in environmental history, the history of science, medicine, and technology, and the history of capitalism.
My first book, Lab Dog: What Global Science Owes American Beagles, traces the emergence of the laboratory dog as an experimental subject in eugenics, radiobiology, pharmacology, tobacco research, neuroscience, and more. It shows how locally bred beagles raised in labs across America became transnational laboratory commodities and how scientists came to understand themselves and what it means to be human through beagles. You can read more about Lab Dog here or at the UChicago Press website.
"Dog Fight," an exhibit for Chicago's Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, co-curated with Zoë Lescaze, opened in May 2023 and explored the history of the "Arvey Ordinance" and the American fight over research use of pound dogs. I created a short companion game that you can play here.
Moving from large, charismatic organisms to small, enigmatic ones, my second book project looks at the history of mycology. An amorphous discipline defined for centuries by the contributions of botanists, amateur collectors, medical researchers, and industrial scientists, I use shifting ideas about what fungi are and do to investigate our understandings of life and liveliness, situated within a transnational story about science, data, labor, and capitalism. For this and subsequent projects, I'm represented by Allison Devereux.
I have ongoing interests in the emergence of the "Standard Man" in American health physics, the history of diabetes drug Metformin in the Philippines, the use of pigs as biomedical research subjects, and wrote some early history of agricultural drones.
My writing has been recognized with the IUHPST Division of History of Science and Technology's Dissertation Prize, the History of Science Society's Nathan Reingold Prize, and Harvard University's Bowdoin Prize, as well as honorable mentions for the Notes and Records Essay Award, the Forum for the History of Human Science's John C. Burnham Early Career Award, the Forum for the History of Health, Medicine, and the Life Sciences' Graduate Student Essay Award, and the American Association for the History of Medicine's Shryock Medal.
I have been supported by the Curtis Gates Lloyd Fellowship of the Lloyd Library & Museum, the Sydney Brenner Research Fellowship of the Center for Humanities & History of Modern Biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Lisa Jardine History of Science Grant Scheme of the The Royal Society, and more.
A CV is available here (PDF). I have a Bluesky account and Instagram.
