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Research Agenda

My research examines how social, political, and institutional structures shape health, healthcare access, and the ethical responsibilities of medical professionals. Working at the intersection of sociology, bioethics, and medical education, I study how systems of law, policy, and professional training influence who receives care, how care is delivered, and how clinicians understand their obligations to structurally marginalized patients.

Across projects, I focus on populations whose interactions with healthcare systems are shaped by legal or institutional precarity, including immigrant communities, incarcerated individuals, and patients navigating linguistic barriers in clinical care. Using ethnographic methods, policy analysis, and community-engaged research, my work seeks both to understand and to challenge the structures that produce exclusion in healthcare and bioethics.

Methodology and Epistemology: Qualitative Research as Ethical Inquiry

My methodological work treats qualitative research not simply as a technique for data collection but as a form of ethical inquiry. When researchers work with communities facing structural vulnerability, the processes of interviewing, interpretation, and representation carry significant moral weight.

My work therefore emphasizes rigor, reflexivity, and transparency in qualitative research. I develop approaches to collaborative coding, consensus-building, and interdisciplinary analysis that help research teams interpret complex social realities while remaining attentive to power, positionality, and responsibility.

Recent projects explore the tensions between ethnography and advocacy through the concept of productive complicity: the idea that researchers are simultaneously observers, collaborators, and participants in the social worlds they study. This work contributes to broader debates about what responsible, engaged scholarship should look like in an era of widening social and health inequities.

Immigration, Legal Status, and Health

A central strand of my research examines immigration status as a structural determinant of health.

Drawing on more than five years of ethnographic fieldwork with mixed-status Mexican American communities in Chicago, my work demonstrates how undocumented status operates as a master status, shaping access to healthcare, employment, education, and everyday belonging.

Building on this foundation, my recent work examines how healthcare systems themselves can produce new forms of stratification. Processes such as insurance eligibility, enrollment under the Affordable Care Act, and interactions with healthcare institutions create moments of status signaling that reshape family dynamics, community relationships, and decisions about seeking care.

This research also raises important questions for research ethics. I argue that traditional IRB frameworks often treat undocumented communities primarily as vulnerable populations to be protected rather than as communities whose participation is essential for understanding and addressing health inequities.

Bioethics, Structural Competency, and Health Justice

Another core strand of my scholarship pushes bioethics beyond individual clinical dilemmas to address the structural conditions that produce health inequities.

My work argues that ethical analysis must engage directly with the broader systems shaping healthcare: immigration enforcement, mass incarceration, structural racism, and the organization of healthcare institutions themselves.

In both my writing and teaching, I advocate for integrating frameworks such as structural competency, intersectionality, and community-based participatory research into the core of bioethics education and practice.

I have also written about the need for trauma-informed and community-rooted approaches to ethics consultation, particularly in urban safety-net hospitals where histories of disinvestment, structural inequality, and medical mistrust shape patient experiences.

Carceral Health and Medical Education

A final line of my research focuses on the relationship between the carceral state and healthcare.

This work examines how incarceration functions as a structural determinant of health and explores the ethical challenges clinicians face when providing care within carceral systems.

It also investigates how medical education prepares future clinicians to engage with these realities. Through partnerships such as the Prison Health News service-learning initiative, I study how community-engaged programs can reshape medical students’ understanding of health inequities and professional responsibility.

My recent article in Social Science & Medicine analyzes how service learning can disrupt the hidden curriculum of medical education by exposing students to structural injustice and community expertise. The research identifies four transformative outcomes for trainees: empathy, engagement with injustice, pluralism, and advocacy.

Together, these projects examine how educational programs can help future clinicians understand and respond to the structural forces shaping health and healthcare.

Across these areas of work, my scholarship seeks to bridge empirical social science, ethical analysis, and medical education. By examining how structural forces shape health and healthcare institutions, I aim to contribute to research and educational practices that prepare clinicians to respond thoughtfully and ethically to the realities of health inequity.