About me

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow based at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. From 2026-27, I am also a Global Health Fellow with The New School. I study the politics of health policy development and market protection through the context of traditional marketplaces, sometimes called “wet markets,” “public markets,” or municipal markets. I am studying these economic contexts in Vietnam and Singapore from both contemporary and historical perspectives.

I am currently writing my first monograph, provisionally titled The Politics of Wet Markets. It juxtaposes current international health narratives on “wet markets” with a historical comparative study of state perception and policies directed towards marketplaces and traders across colonial Indochina and present-day Vietnam. I earned my PhD from the University of Michigan, based jointly in the departments of Health Management and Policy (HMP) & Political Science in the summer of 2025. I have a specific regional focus in Southeast Asia and in Vietnam, where I was based between 2021-2023 conducting fieldwork for my dissertation, meeting and interviewing traders, food safety specialists, managers, and global experts. I especially enjoy visiting traditional markets (chợ truyền thống) to learn about the cultural and historical aspects of food trade. I am currently working on projects related to colonial-era policy directed towards food traders in Singapore and Hong Kong. I also have interest in studying political development in the American South. I am affiliated with the HMP Governance Lab at the University of Michigan. My work on “wet markets” has recently been published in Health Security. I have also contributed to the Oxford Bibliographies, and have reviewed for The Lancet Planetary Health.

My dissertation research has been supported by a Boren Award for International Study, FLAS, the Menakka and Essel Bailey fellowship, and the Rackham Graduate School, among others. I have long been interested in the intersections between food policy, politics, and health. Prior to my time in Michigan, I taught social sciences at a magnet high school in Sejong City, South Korea and helped develop community partnerships and programs for the Mississippi Center for Obesity Research in Jackson, MS. I received my master's degree in International Health Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2015, and my bachelor's degree from the University of Mississippi in 2014. I grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.