What happens when biomedical technologies promise not simply to treat disease, but to transform bodies and lives? How do ideas about cure, normalcy, risk, and possibility shape the development and experience of emerging technologies? Ethnographic and interview-based research spanning laboratories, clinics, and patient communities.

I study the development and experience of emerging biotechnologies, with particular attention to how scientists, clinicians, patients, and institutions construct ideas about cure, risk, normalcy, and the futures that new technologies make possible. Drawing on medical sociology, science and technology studies, and bioethics, I examine biomedical innovation across the laboratory, clinic, and everyday life.

My forthcoming book, Sickle Cells to Super Cells, follows the development of gene therapy for sickle cell disease from laboratory research and clinical trials into the lives of patients and families. The book examines how the promise of cure is constructed, negotiated, and experienced, showing how biological transformation does not necessarily resolve the social and institutional conditions that shape life with disease.

I am particularly interested in emerging technologies that blur distinctions between treatment, cure, enhancement, and transformation—and in what these technologies reveal about how medicine imagines better bodies and better futures.

Why do promising biomedical innovations succeed scientifically yet struggle to become accessible, trusted, and sustainable forms of care? What social and institutional conditions determine whether innovation translates into meaningful improvements in people’s lives? Research on gene therapy, healthcare systems, access, and the social infrastructure of medicine.

Biomedical innovation does not move seamlessly from laboratory discovery to clinical benefit. I study what happens in the space between technological possibility and lived therapeutic success: how healthcare infrastructure, institutional practices, relationships, histories of mistrust, economic arrangements, and patients’ everyday circumstances shape the translation of innovation into care. This work brings together medical sociology, science and technology studies, bioethics, and implementation-oriented research to ask what societies must build around new technologies for them to fulfill their therapeutic promise.

My research on gene therapy for sickle cell disease shows how barriers can persist even after a technology demonstrates clinical efficacy and receives regulatory approval. Related work examines access to gene therapy, institutional preparedness, trust and mistrust, and the forms of care required before, during, and after transformative therapies.

Ongoing projects examine what happens after treatment: how patients rebuild their lives, and how families, health systems, and other institutions recognize and respond to people whose bodies have been medically transformed. This work asks not only whether an innovation reaches the clinic, but whether it is truly integrated into the lives of the people it is meant to serve.

Whom do people trust when they make decisions about their health, and why? How are people seeking information, technologies, and interventions beyond conventional healthcare, and what does this reveal about the changing authority of medicine? Research on medical mistrust, expertise, and the boundaries of healthcare.

Trust shapes whether people seek care, accept new technologies, and believe the experts who offer them. I study how people evaluate medical authority, whose expertise they rely on, and how experiences with health institutions shape those judgments. With colleagues, I developed the Institutional Medical Mistrust Scale, a measure of mistrust directed at health institutions, which I use to study how mistrust shapes the experiences of people living with chronic illness.

Medicine also increasingly extends beyond the clinic. Emerging technologies and approaches allow people to pursue health information and interventions without first becoming patients in conventional healthcare systems. I study these emerging spaces of consumer medicine and what their growth reveals about changing expectations of health, expertise, prevention, and medical responsibility.

My next book project, currently in development, uses ethnography and interviews to follow people as they move between conventional medicine and consumer health markets. I am particularly interested in what these movements reveal about trust, expertise, and the changing relationship between patients and biomedicine.

Across these areas, my research combines ethnography, qualitative interviews, community-engaged methods, quantitative methods, and interdisciplinary collaboration. I work with patients, families, clinicians, scientists, community organizations, and policymakers to study biomedical innovation as it moves across laboratories, healthcare institutions, communities, and everyday life. This approach treats the social and ethical dimensions of innovation not as questions that arise after technologies are developed, but as integral to understanding how biomedical futures are imagined, built, and experienced.