Profiles
Steven Gonzalez
Steven Gonzalez is a PhD Candidate in the History, Anthropology, and Science,Technology, and Society (HASTS) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His ethnographic research investigates the ecological impact of data storage infrastructures, focusing on how thermal management conventions are shaped or contested by the practices of data center technicians.
stevengo(at)mit.edu
Jia Hui Lee
​
Jia Hui's research is about rodents in Tanzania. His ongoing doctoral research at HASTS, MIT focuses on practices of work, communication, and cognition among humans and other animals in the context of science and technology in the global South. He has previously published on the relationship between international aid networks and human rights in Uganda, based on research carried out for his M.Phil. at the University of Cambridge and B.A. at Harvard University.
jiahui(at)mit.edu
​
Photo by the amazing Caterina Saccardo.
Luísa Reis-Castro
Luísa Reis-Castro is a PhD candidate in the History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is currently writing her dissertation on different vector control projects being researched, tested, and implemented in Brazil, which attempt to use the Aedes aegypti mosquito as a means of controlling the pathogens it is known to transmit. Besides thinking about clouds of mosquitoes, she joined the speculative fiction project “World Without Clouds” to collectively think further about the politics of knowledge production and the interconnections between humans and non-humans.
luisarc(at)mit.edu
Gabrielle Robbins
Gabrielle combines her interests in medical and environmental anthropology and STS to study the interaction between pharmaceutical and agricultural industries across sites in Francophone Africa, the United States, and elsewhere. She asks how local communities creatively navigate global scientific, extractive, and industrial systems on the ground. Her current project focuses on the cultivation and processing of the antimalarial herb sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua) in Madagascar. Prior to arriving at HASTS, Gabrielle received her B.A. in Anthropology from Barnard College, in the course of which she conducted fieldwork in Madagascar and Northern California.
​
glmr(at)mit.edu
Julianne Yip
Julianne Yip is a sociocultural anthropologist interested in different ways of thinking about human-environment relations, with a focus on the anthropology of scientific knowledge and Science and Technology Studies. She received her PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from McGill University in 2019 and was a 2019 Research Fellow in the ‘Transformations of the Human’ program at the Berggruen Institute, a think tank based in Los Angeles. Julianne is interested in understanding what it means to be human today in a time of ecological crisis when nature/culture distinctions are no longer self-evident. For her dissertation research, she conducted an anthropology of sea ice and climate change, following scientists in their labs in Seattle, WA to their field sites in Alaska. Most recently, she conducted fieldwork in the Sculpting Evolution group at the MIT Media Lab where she followed bioengineers' in their efforts to shape ecosystems at the molecular level.
​
julianne.yip(at)gmail.com
Photo Credit: Portrait by Spencer Lowell, 2018. Image courtesy of the Berggruen Institute.