I am a social anthropologist and have been at the Department of Anthropology & Archaeology since 2016. Prior to that I worked at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA), University of Oxford, at the Institute of Health and Society, University of Oslo, and at University College London.  

After my post-graduate research on rural primary health care, Tibetan medicine and memories of Communist reforms in Central Tibet, as well as language studies at Tibet University in Lhasa, I curated Bodies in Balance – The Art of Tibetan Medicine at the Rubin Museum, New York. My subsequent Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship at the University of Oslo investigated gender and healthcare in Tibet. Medicine and Memory: Amchi Physicians in an Age of Reform is my most recent book (UWP, 2018). 

In my current Wellcome Trust-funded Research Fellowship Tibetan Sign Language and Deaf Identities in the Making I study how the newly-emerging Tibetan Sign Language (TSL) in Lhasa is transforming and empowering deaf people in a highly complex and contested cultural and linguistic space. It also looks closely at deaf education of ethnic Tibetans.

Apart from academic publications, outputs also include contributions to the international linguistic data bases Ethnologue and SIGN HUB Atlas as well as ongoing public engagement through a variety of media and inclusive curatorial practices in art and anthropology museums.

To date my regional focus has been on the Tibetan areas of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the wider Himalayan and South Asian region – including Bhutan and Nepal, and most recently on Japan.