Research Areas

Anthropology of infectious diseases, zoonotic and vectorborne diseases in particular; social studies of biomedicine, political ecology, global health history and politics, multispecies ethnography, borders and borderlands.

My current research studies the (dis)locations of topicality in relation to the emergence of zoonoses and vector-borne diseases in the Global North. My focus lies on Chagas, a parasitic disease transmitted by an insect vector, that has gained its epidemiological relevance in the US through its association with human migration from Latin America despite growing evidence of local transmission cycles that have continuously been part of US landscapes. I ask about the effects that framing Chagas disease as a foreign threat has on public health policy and clinical practice and care in the US, as well as about the material realities that organize this framework and maintain a broader nationalistic epidemiological landscape. Finally, since Chagas engages multiple species' life cycles, my project relies on ethnographic methods that attend to the history and politics of the interactions between different living and non-living elements that constitute the environments of transmission and parasitic development in the US.

I am a medical doctor-turned-anthropologist who works at the intersections of public health, medical anthropology, ecology, and environmental history. I have spent most of my life in Mexico City except for the time when I did my master's in medical anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, and now that I moved to the Bay Area to continue my graduate studies. Before starting the PhD program, I worked as research coordinator at an HIV and STI care and prevention NGO in Mexico and as a research assistant in a fieldwork-based epidemiological research project on dengue in the US-Mexico border region. I feel at my best in tropical and subtropical climates and find great joy in long walks through urban and periurban areas.