I recently graduated from Rice University with my PhD in anthropology.

Like many anthropologists, I’ve moved a lot. I grew up in China before moving to the United States for graduate studies. Upon finishing my doctoral program, I moved to Ireland to live with my husband. I get excited about being new to everything and doing things for the first time. (Why does one need to speak to the bus driver while swiping the bus card, and the card won’t go through until the driver punches a few buttons? Very confusing, but fascinating.)

I spent quite a few years doing my doctoral project, which is about how the abstract demographic and economic concept of “population aging” is lived in everyday life. I wanted to understand what makes today’s Chinese people, young and old, so acutely aware that they are living in an aging society (for example, you would constantly see young standup comedians talking about it) and how this looming future of aging affects how people think about and act upon things. I love doing research; I enjoy the process of connecting the dots and figuring things out. I especially cherish how research allows me to think about the world a little differently.

In the past few years, outside my dissertation research, I conducted research for Rice University’s library and the medical humanities programs, coached undergraduate students to conduct qualitative research, co-translated American sociologist Mitchell Duneier’s L.A. Times Book Prize winner Sidewalk into Chinese, hosted podcasts interviewing book authors, and wrote several public-facing pieces in my field. I was also heavily involved in teaching first-year college students academic English writing. I work with students whose first language is English as well as English-as-a-second-language students from various backgrounds.

And outside my formal research project, I keep a large folder of research on my personal interests. I am interested in thinking about how the narratives of natural history museums (especially of dinosaurs!) impact our understanding of today’s humans, societies, and our future. I pay a lot of attention to the public discussions around sports and technologies (think about VAR in football and Hawkeye vs line calls in tennis) and how they reconstruct our perceptions of human faults and accidents. I have also been thinking and reading about the limitations and possibilities of the accessibility designs of smart devices. I think especially well when I’m running and swimming.

Before graduate school, I had experience working as a journalist and in event planning in the music industry. I want to work in a field where I can combine my research and communication skills and my ability to work in faster-pacing settings to build something that’s beautiful and useful, and brings people together.

And yes, I have a cat. Her name is Saru (named after the Science Office in Star Trek Discovery). I adopted her in 2019. I love her wholeheartedly.