Examining the recent history of the quantitative human sciences
Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies
Affiliated Graduate Faculty in Sociology
University of California, Davis
Research
I am a historian of science, technology, and medicine in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on the quantitative human sciences and the technologies of human measurement. My first book, Building the Population Bomb, examines how human population growth became a subject of scientific expertise and an object of governmental and philanthropic intervention in the twentieth century. My current project, Molecular Eugenics, traces the history of the American pursuit of intelligence genes from the importation of the Binet-Simon test in 1908 to the most recent genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 2022.
Teaching
I teach undergraduate courses on gender and science, health and medical technologies, and the visualization of social and health-related data over time. I teach graduate courses on computational research methods in the humanities and interpretive social sciences.
Words
Recent publications, interviews, and thinking.
