Compiled by Nicole Foti for the Summer 2023 SKAT Newsletter

Here are some of the student members of the SKAT section. Learn more about their research interests from their introductions below.

Emma Brandt

Emma Brandt is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University. She is currently writing a dissertation about media literacy and institutional distrust in Serbia drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and digital methods. Her research shows how youth develop strategies to navigate an increasingly digitized media landscape which is shaped by broader histories of conflict and corruption. More broadly, her research interests include conspiracy theory, social media platforms, nationalism, belief, news consumption, and alternative health movements. She will be spending next year writing her dissertation in Amman, Jordan.

Hayden Fulton

My name is Hayden Fulton and I am currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at the University of South Florida (USF). I am also affiliated with Moffitt Cancer Center, where I am a qualitative researcher in the Participant Research Innovations and Measurement (PRISM) Core. Drawing from medical sociology, disability studies, trans studies, and feminist science studies, my work focuses on the intersection of gender and medical knowledge.

My dissertation project, entitled “Constructing Moral Worthiness: Crowdfunding for Trans Medical Care,” employs a narrative analysis framework to examine how people crowdfunding for gender-affirming care story their financial need. I hold a graduate certificate in women’s and gender studies (USF), an MA in sociology (USF), and a BA in sociology with minors in women’s and gender studies and geographic information systems (Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania). Since the spring of 2021, I have been an instructor at USF, where I have designed and taught as instructor of record Introduction to Sociology and Medical Sociology. My pedagogy centers on the utility of sociological frameworks and methods in helping students pursue their educational and professional goals. Based on this work, I was awarded my department’s Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award in 2022 and 2023.

Outside of research/teaching, I enjoy running, listening to audiobooks, and spending time with my partner and our adorable cat Buddy. This year I am excited to serve the section as one of the graduate student representatives to council.

Wanheng Hu

My name is Wanheng Hu, and I am a Ph.D. candidate in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at Cornell University with a graduate minor in Media Studies. I am interested in understanding how the role of human expertise is envisioned, enacted, and evaluated by various stakeholders—publics, regulators, and experts themselves—during times of technoscientific transformations. At present, I am actively writing my dissertation, which is an ethnographic study of the cultivation and ramifications of machine learning (ML) systems in image-based diagnostics within the Chinese medical AI industry. This work explores how notions of medical expertise are re-imagined and re-enacted at different phases, including data annotation, algorithm training, clinical application, and regulatory approvals. Grounded in STS, my research is often broadly situated at the intersection of the sociology of expertise, medical sociology, and critical data/algorithm studies. I also have a strong interest in topics related to scientism and technocracy, science and the public, modernization and development studies—especially agricultural modernization, and the social history of science in modern China.

My work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, China Times Cultural Foundation, and the Hu Shih Fellowship, among others. In the 2022-23 academic year, I was a visiting research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. At Cornell, I am also a graduate affiliate of the East Asia Program and a member of the Artificial Intelligence, Policy, and Practice (AIPP) initiative within the Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. Prior to my journey at Cornell, I studied in Beijing and received a BS in Biomedical English, a BL in Sociology, and an MPhil in Philosophy of Science and Technology, all from Peking University. On a lighter note, I am a connoisseur of spicy food and firmly believe that no chili in a dish should go to waste!

Jina Lee

I am Jina Lee, a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the University of Arizona. My research interests broadly lie in the areas of sociology of science, computational social science, gender and inequality, and medical sociology. My research investigates how the assessment of worth gives rise to structural patterns in the field of science and medicine. I ask: (1) what knowledge claims are deemed to be worthy of attention and how does it affect the process of knowledge accumulation? (2) how do gender and race shape the valuation process and thus reproduce structural inequality? Examining these questions, I utilize various methods such as computational text analysis, bibliometric analysis, and online experiments. My research is published in the American Sociological Review, Socius, and the Journal of Social Entrepreneurship.

Wayne Rivera-Cuadrado Wayne Rivera-Cuadrado is a PhD candidate at Northwestern University and fellow at the Institute for Policy Research’s Center for Neighborhood Engaged Research and Science (CORNERS). Wayne’s research focuses on the qualitative study of secondary experiences to negative life events, particularly violence and illness. Within this broad research agenda, he is interested in how both formal and informal providers make sense of victims’ negative life experiences, develop knowledge and expertise around these issues, and understand themselves relative to others’ victimization. His dissertation focuses on healthcare professionals’ experiences of risk and knowledge production during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, and his most recent publication draws from these interviews to analyze the construction of occupational risk within essential work relative to biomedical factors.

Fred Traylor

Fred Traylor is a PhD student in Sociology at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. His research primarily centers on how relationships with science and religion, both separately and together, affect how people think about climate change and climate change solutions. For example, one project investigates the perceived moral hazard of technological solutions to climate change and another explores the role of institutional trust in advancing support for climate policy. His MA thesis compared how members of Congress understand scientific authority and how this changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Two secondary streams of research explores innovations in survey methodology and trends in religious disaffiliation. In a project funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, he fielded five surveys to test for sampling and mode effects in environmental public opinion research. He is also investigating “don’t know” responses to survey questions on environmental and technological issues. Lastly, he studies how family ties and political disagreements affect religious behavior and belonging throughout the lifespan. In addition to an MA in Sociology from Rutgers University, he holds a BA in Sociology and an MS in Social Data Analytics and Research from The University of Texas at Dallas.

Mira Vale

Mira Vale is an advanced PhD student interested in economic sociology, medical sociology, and ethnography. Her research investigates technological innovation and the transformation of expertise and professional values, using the field of medicine as an empirical case. Mira’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Predoctoral Traineeship, the ASA/NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, and the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.

Mira’s dissertation and book project, Data Values: Moral Entrepreneurship in Digital Health, examines efforts to build an ethics of AI. Specifically, she studies the creation of moral rules that govern digital surveillance for mental healthcare. Researchers increasingly turn to technologies like smartphone apps and wearable devices to produce data for healthcare, but formal regulation of these tools lags behind, giving researchers latitude to establish norms and values of their field. To understand this moral self-regulation, Mira completed ethnographic fieldwork with academic teams developing technology for mental healthcare. She argues researchers engage in what Howard Becker called moral entrepreneurship, shaping the field of digital health by setting what it focuses on, what it neglects, and whom it serves. As Mira’s dissertation analyzes this process, it helps explain how moral ideas are adjudicated amidst uncertainty and it uncovers new mechanisms for social inequality in our digital future.

Beyond Mira’s dissertation, she has published articles exploring various aspects of morality, health, and technology. All build on in-depth ethnographic research and interviews in diverse medical institutional settings. Her work has been published in Social Science & Medicine, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, among other venues.

Christina Wilmot

Christina Wilmot is a Ph.D. student in sociology at UCLA, currently working towards candidacy. She is interested in the varying intersections of technology and society, including using novel computational methods to analyze social information, studying sites of technological advancement, and looking at the effects of the adoption of new technologies on societies. Previously, Christina studied computer science and worked as a software engineer at Google. She aims to make computational methods more accessible to social researchers from a variety of substantive and methodological fields. Her MA thesis investigated the language of academic peer review feedback in computer science “open review” venues, using novel natural language processing methods.

One fun fact about her is that her cat Carlos was briefly the “face of feline diabetes”, when they enrolled in a clinical trial to help researchers extend feline diabetic remission, and the researchers found Carlos so cute that they decided to use his photos for trial recruitment materials. Carlos was the first cat in the trial to leave remission, which is when they learned he was in the placebo group!