He received his B.A. from Williams College in 2003 and his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University in 2010. His research, broadly speaking, examines the development of new biotechnologies and their relationship to the anthropological study of medicine, the body, and inequality in Latin America. He has published articles in Medical Anthropology, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, among others. His book, The Biopolitics of Beauty examines how beauty became an aim of national health in Brazil, and the subtle ways in which beauty is laden with affective value within everyday social practices—thus becoming the terrain upon which race, class, and gender hierarchies are reproduced and contested in Brazil..