I am a PhD Candidate in Sociology and Mellon Cluster Fellow in science studies at Northwestern University. My work is concerned with the tensions between democracy and expertise. In my dissertation, I study how surgeons, judges, and global health NGOs use the statistical method of meta-analysis to make ostensibly objective decisions. In their reliance on meta-analysis, these actors transform social conflicts into statistical ones, enacting what I call “P-value politics.”

In earlier work, I focused on the clashes between health social movements and biomedical experts. In my 2023 Social Studies of Science paper, I explain how a group of people with type 1 diabetes who engineered an open-source artificial pancreas “routinized” their lay expertise. And in my 2020 Social Studies of Science paper, I study how contemporary HIV/AIDS activists challenged clinical researchers’ definition of being “at risk” for HIV.