About Me

Hello and thanks for visiting my professional website! I’m a postdoctoral researcher, an independent scholar on geography and urban history, and a recent PhD graduate of Columbia University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

My research fields are human geography, urban history, and the sociology of immigration and community change. Generally, I’m concerned with human migration, demographic change, and intersections with the planes of public policy and urban planning regimes in the late-20th-century U.S. metropolis.

As a mixed-methods researcher, I engage with pragmatic and iterative methods to combine demographic public datasets, ethnographic and archival research, and social philosophy to narrate urban histories with communities of color and queer communities at the forefront.

Current projects: My current projects include a local history manuscript on the intersections of immigration and the queer community of the Bay Area, focusing on archival material on the Filipino Task Force on AIDS, and my work brings me to the GLBT Historical Society and the SFPL History Center. Another project is a paper on cultural discourses from areas of Asian American scholarship in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Dissertation research: My doctoral research documents the role of public policy and advocacy organizations in the formation and life of Southeast Asian-American immigrant communities, and it has been recently mentioned in a featured article at the San Francisco Public Library for AAPI month. My doctoral dissertation, titled Immigrant Placemaking and Urban Space (2023), focuses on the Southeast Asian-American communities of San Francisco from 2000–2020, documenting histories through interviews and volunteer ethnography. In my work, I analyze and map public demographic data, review community and public archives, and document the work of local organizations and volunteers.

Teaching: I have taught courses as a graduate student instructor on political theory, public policy, urban economics, and planning practice at Columbia and UC Berkeley.

Other background: I also have a Master of Public Policy degree from the Goldman School of Public Policy at Berkeley. As part of my policy training, I worked for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as a researcher and Bay Area Rapid Transit as a project consultant. Prior to all of this, I had the pleasure of working as an AmeriCorps and VISTA volunteer with Habitat for Humanity in San Francisco. Overall, I view my career aspirations as an educator and policy advocate to be deeply connected. I am currently based in New York City and San Francisco. Thank you for viewing my site, and please feel free to reach out!