About

The behind-the-scenes, behind-the-science work is what I study. From the perspectives of social science, history, and philosophy, my work investigates how scientists, technicians, and other workers make specimens, data, and knowledge in laboratories. This topic includes who works in laboratories and what they do, how people teach and learn how to do and understand science, how social structures shape how people work, and how groups of workers define themselves based on their concepts of skill, expertise, and social status. My studies of how lab workers make and use specimens and images of nature show the complexity, skillfulness, and creativity of scientific work. In particular, I am interested in the unwritten work and workers of science: the technicians whose names and work are missing from publications, the volunteers and students whose contributions to lab work are often overlooked, and the tacit, innovative, trial-and-error techniques and skills that workers rely on to generate “g

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Engineering
• Sociology
• Engineering ethics
• Social Science
• Psychology
• Engineering management
• Knowledge management
• Social psychology
• Art
• Visual arts
• Geology
• Epistemology
• Mechanical engineering
• Law
• Archaeology
• Medical education
• History
• Mathematics education
• Software engineering
• Medicine
• Pedagogy
• Public relations

Selected publications

• Report on the INES Roundtable, ‘Making STS reverberate through engineering: reflections on engineering studies’ at the Society for the Social Studies of Science Annual Meeting, 6 September 2025

  Engineering Studies · 2026-01-02

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• We have been here Before: Reflections on Engineering and Authoritarianism

  Engineering Studies · 2025-01-02 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Using REU Program Evaluation to Foster Learning through Reflection

  2025-08-21

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Earth Sciences from the Perspectives of Science and Technology Studies

  Historiographies of science · 2025-01-01

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The discipline of science and technology studies (STS) can provide historians with methodological approaches and theoretical frameworks to access key aspects of the Earth sciences, such as scientific practice, technology, and social values. This chapter outlines these tools as demonstrated by exemplary STS studies of the Earth sciences.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Place for Science and Technology Studies: Observation, Intervention, and Collaboration

  Engineering Studies · 2025-09-02 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• “Where could this take me and what kind of interesting stuff could I do with that?" The role of curiosity in undergraduate learning

  2024-02-06 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This qualitative research paper explores how undergraduate research experiences impact engineering students' curiosity and responses to uncertainty.Curiosity occurs when a student encounters uncertainty and seeks to close a gap in knowledge [1], which can lead to deep and meaningful learning [2].In research labs, students can extend and apply content they learn in class and pursue independent lines of inquiry.We ask whether engaging in research experiences can therefore support and promote students' curiosity.Eight undergraduate engineering students working in research labs participated in a semi-structured interview about their research and class experiences.These interviews were coded for themes related to uncertainty and curiosity.This paper specifically investigates causes of students' curiosity and their responses to uncertainty.Students were curious about a wide variety of topics both within and outside of engineering and appreciated that research provided opportunities to apply and deepen their knowledge.They frequently encountered uncertainty and responded by independently seeking resources or consulting a mentor, most often a graduate student.These findings can help inform how professors in both classroom and lab settings can cultivate and encourage their students' curiosity and help them respond to uncertainty.

  PublisherDOI

• REU Program Evaluation: A Valuable Tool for Studying Undergraduate Socialization in Engineering

  2024 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Software engineering

  Abstract This Work in Progress paper introduces a project investigating whether and how a summer research experience relates to undergraduate students' sense of identity and belonging in engineering, understanding of research as a process, and research-related academic and professional skills. We draw from theories of situated learning and socialization into professional communities to ask what and how students learn during an NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) summer program in materials science and engineering. In addition, we propose that REU program evaluation data can offer valuable insights into student learning, but that these data are rarely analyzed with regards to research questions. Typically, they are collected, used to evaluate the extent to which a program is meeting its goals for internal improvement and to satisfy funders' requirements, and then discarded. This is a missed opportunity. Furthermore, REU sites typically evaluate their programs with quantitative surveys, even though each site tends to serve only a few dozen students. Surveys designed for large-scale participant pools cannot capture nuances of students' experiences, especially with comparatively low participant numbers. As a result, the effects of research experience on these students' learning and identity are difficult for engineering education researchers to access. This is particularly problematic because many REU sites are designed to serve marginalized populations in engineering and science. Not studying these students' experiences because their sample size is small is inequitable, and contributes to the existing knowledge gap about marginalized populations' experiences and success in engineering. Designing evaluation methods to also produce rich data for research on these small student cohorts is a powerful way to address this inequity and provide important insights into student learning and identity formation. As the program evaluators for a three-year REU site, we pushed the boundaries of traditional program evaluation to generate data that can also be used to address research questions, in addition to conducting cumulative and summative evaluation of the program's effectiveness. To access broader questions about engineering identity, belonging, and comprehension of knowledge production practices among undergraduates, we designed new quantitative and qualitative instruments. These instruments are pre/post surveys and interviews that draw from existing instruments commonly used for REU evaluation (e.g., the SURE, the URSSA, the URES) as well as instruments that capture students' views of the nature of science. In this paper, we share our design process for these instruments, our research methodology (including how we achieved IRB approval for evaluation data), and preliminary results from one summer cohort's survey and interview responses.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Student curiosity in engineering courses and research experiences: “I'm kind of torn between being a decent student and a decent engineer.”

  2024-02-07

  articleOpen access

  This mixed-methods research paper investigates how classes and research experiences affect undergraduate engineering students' curiosity. Students become curious when they recognize a gap in their knowledge and seek to resolve this uncertainty When students are curious about a topic, their learning better generalizes to new material and contexts Both the classroom and the research lab are spaces where students regularly encounter uncertainty and new information and are ideal contexts to examine student curiosity. In the current study, we examined how students' experiences in classes and research labs may foster and/or suppress their curiosity. Twenty undergraduate engineering students completed a self-report survey of curiosity and responded to questions about how different instructional elements impacted their curiosity. Eleven of these students also participated in a semi-structured interview about their class and research experiences. Survey responses suggest that hands-on activities and labs were most likely to make students feel curious and exams were least likely. In the interviews, students expressed that they experienced curiosity when their instructors were engaging and made connections to real world applications, whereas they felt less curious when they were overscheduled and when class content was redundant. Students noted that working in a research lab gave them more time to process information, develop questions, and build relationships with peers and mentors compared to their class experiences. We discuss the implications of these findings and offer suggestions for encouraging students' curiosity in both class and research lab settings.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Timing Science: The Temporal Role of Scientists in the Construction of Data

  Philosophy Theory and Practice in Biology · 2024-06-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The processes of producing scientific knowledge rely on the temporality of data, yet they also obscure this relationship. Scientists hope that knowledge claims can stand relatively independent from their context of production. Instead, a more realistic and trustworthy view would be to embrace data’s history and “journey” (Leonelli and Tempini 2020) as a component of the knowledge claims that these data inspire. These journeys describe how data and people interact and thereby influence each other’s identity and epistemic worth. In this paper, I propose a model to help philosophers and other analysts pay closer attention to the people who work with scientific data, specifically by considering how these practitioners conceptualize time. I argue that how practitioners experience time reflects the personal, professional, epistemic, and ethical values that guide their decisions about how to do science. These conceptions of time differ by profession, career stage, identity, institutional context, and other factors specific to practitioners’ lives as well as their scientific or disciplinary culture. I draw from two case studies of vertebrate fossils to illustrate how various conceptions of time co-exist for practitioners, as indicators of the values that guide practitioners’ decisions as they do scientific work.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Caring for Equitable Relations in Interdisciplinary Collaborations

  Catalyst Feminism Theory Technoscience · 2023-11-05 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Collaborative research between scholars of science and technology studies (STS)and scholars of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) is a growing trend. The papers assembled in thisSpecial Section offer both embodied and empirical knowledge on how ethnographers negotiate our roles in integrative research when constrained by what our technoscientific collaborators value, what funders demand, what our home institutions expect, what we want to learn from the worlds we study, and the social transformations we envision in science and society. We grapple with how we as ethnographers can best balance caring for the communities we study, the ones we serve, and the ones we identify with. We take care that knowledge making is political. Race, gender, class, and ability status of scholars intersect with the organizational, institutional, and cultural contexts in which we practice science to shape and be shaped by entrenched power relations.Through a feminist politics of care, this collection transforms tensions in interdisciplinary collaborations into resources that enlarge our understandings of what these collaborations are like for STS ethnographers, make visible certain labors within them and, crucially, enrich our vision for what we want these collaborations to be.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Learning in laboratories: Investigating interactions between engineering research communities and undergraduate workers

  NSF · $59k · 2016–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Kathryn Neeley

  American Society For Engineering Education

  6 shared

• María Varelas

  University of Illinois Chicago

  3 shared

• Elizabeth J. Opila

  3 shared

• Natalie Evans

  University of Virginia

  2 shared

• Justine M. Kane

  2 shared

• Jessica Scoville

  University of Virginia

  2 shared

• Jamie Jirout

  University of Virginia

  2 shared

• Luis Felipe R. Murillo

  University of Notre Dame

  2 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of Cambridge

• M.S.

  University of Chicago

Awards & honors

• Research Collaboration Award, UVA, 2023
• Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) Fellowship, UVA…
• Fellowship, UVA Faculty Seminar on the Teaching of Writing 2…
• Research Award, University of Virginia 2020
• Donchian-Casteen Teaching Fellowship, UVA Institute for Prac…