ABOUT ME

I am a third year Ph.D. student at UCLA in the Cinema and Media Studies program. I have a Bachelor’s of Science (B.S.) in Biology with a focus on genomics from Loyola Marymount University.

Merging my background in Biology with Media Studies, I draw upon Science and Technology Studies, Visual Culture, and Critical Data Studies to understand the relations among the biological sciences, surveillance technology, and visualizing the body. My research is cross-disciplinary, where I draw from Information Studies, Media Studies, and History and Philosophy of Science to examine the relationship between optical technology — such as the camera — and computer vision in data-driven decisionmaking and algorithmic governance of bodies. My work seeks to question how the visualization, categorization, and classification of bodies in surveillance are extended from the biological sciences, thus scientific culture.

My dissertation asks how computation (biometric surveillance) situates the body as something to optimize to achieve perfection. I aim to examine how scientific culture, largely overshadowed by gene editing (and biological determinism), goes beyond the laboratory into surveillance practices. With this, I hope to understand how algorithms calculate perfection.