I am an anthropologist who currently works on EU peatland policies at the Data Science Centre of the University of Galway, Ireland.

I didn’t know anything about peatland until I moved to Ireland. Now I’m obsessed. With the team, we collect peatland policies across the EU and the UK and figure out the best way to make these policies accessible. I do UX research, and I’m learning something new everyday around peatland ecology, community-based restorative practices, and EU environmental laws.

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. And? And while I looked for jobs outside academia, I did projects with the fantastic people of Galway and my homemade dumplings made it onto This is Galway!

I spent seven years doing my doctoral project, which was about how the abstract demographic and economic concept of “population ageing” 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 ageing society (for example, you would constantly see young standup comedians talking about it) and how this looming future of ageing affects how people think about and act upon things. I asked questions about how we normalise ideas of productivity, development, and particular ways of understanding time. I love doing research; I enjoy the process of connecting the dots and figuring things out. I especially love 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 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 attending graduate school in the US, I had experience working as a journalist and in event planning in the music industry in China.

I just want to build something beautiful and useful that 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.