In my postdoctoral work, I will begin a fellowship in neuroethics at UCLA's Semel Institute, joining Dr. Ashley Feinsinger's lab. My research there turns to participant engagement in brain-computer interface (BCI) research, extending my broader interest in how patients and research subjects navigate uncertainty, bodily risk, and shifting medical authority. Building on the methodological and theoretical foundations of my dissertation work in medical sociology and science and technology studies, this project examines the ethical and experiential dimensions of emerging neurotechnologies from the perspective of the people most directly implicated in them.

My dissertation, The Toxic Pregnancy: An Ethnography of Reproductive Psychiatry, draws on four+ years of ethnographic fieldwork in a reproductive psychiatric clinic at a large Los Angeles teaching hospital, alongside interviews with patients, residents, attending physicians, and therapists. The project examines how clinical uncertainty and maternal ideology shape the treatment of mental illness during the pre-conception, pregnancy, and postpartum periods, tracing how patients and clinicians navigate competing understandings of risk, toxicity, and care. Theoretically, the dissertation develops the concept of toxicity as a boundary object and traces its imaginations and afterlives across the clinic, while also engaging biological and eugenic logics, the "sociogenic gap" between social and biological explanations of illness, and a closing gesture toward what I call placental ethics. Situated at the intersection of medical sociology, science and technology studies, and feminist health scholarship, the project offers a grounded account of how reproductive psychiatry mediates ideals of the "clean" or "non-toxic" mother in an era of intensifying maternal surveillance.