I earned my PhD in Education at UCLA in the Social Sciences and Comparative Education division. My dissertation research used participatory design in a collaborative visual storytelling project with young people who received heart transplants as children and were transitioning to adulthood and adult healthcare. The collaborative films that we created have been screened at international conferences, at specialized medical symposia for heart transplant professionals, at seminars aimed at supporting transplant patients and their families in transition, and in multiple undergraduate seminars addressing a variety of topics including disability, gender, and education.
While completing my dissertation I developed additional lines of collaborative research. As a member of The Asthma Files (TAF), a decade-long research consortium, I participate in TAF-California working with Kim Fortun, Mike Fortun, Sharon Traweek and a global network of scholars on air pollution governance and environmental justice issues across California. As an educational researcher I work with Fred Ariel Hernandez to study how K-16 education is responding to the complex and interwoven crises represented by COVID-19, BLM and ongoing educational, health, environmental, and economic disparity in the San Gabriel Valley of Southern California.
Currently I work with a team in UCI's EcoGovLab on a curriculum design project for 11th and 12th grade students in California that focuses on Environmental Justice and Climate Change. I teach a disability studies and documentary filmmaking capstone course at UCLA. Together, with Jade Vu Henry, I founded Three Iris, a form of entreuprenerial, collaborative scholarship through research and documentary film that creates and curates feminist and postcolonial stories about science, technology, and society.
