I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Bucharest and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Global Health at Duke Kunshan University.

I earned my B.A. from the University of Arizona in 2009, graduating magna cum laude, my M.A. from the University of Bucharest in 2011, and my Ph.D. from the University of Hong Kong in 2016. I have been a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy since 2020.

Put simply, my work asks how health systems work in practice and how people make sense of and respond to their health concerns. Drawing on qualitative methods, I have studied patient categorization in emergency departments, informal practices related to health, meanings of ageing, and access to healthcare among vulnerable populations. My fieldwork has taken place in Romania, China, and Cambodia.

I have published in journals such as Social Science & Medicine, Sociology of Health & Illness, Time & Society, and BMC Public Health. My first book, The Moral Evaluation of Emergency Department Patients: An Ethnography of Triage Work in Romania,  was published in 2023 (Lexington Books).

Before joining the University of Bucharest, I was Assistant Professor of Global Health at the Global Health Research Center, Duke Kunshan University (2022-2025) and Lecturer in the Department of Health and Environmental Sciences at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (2017- 2022).