Personal
I was born and raised in the borderland city of El Paso, Texas. Growing up, I spent so much time in the swimming pool that it ultimately led me to pursue swimming at the collegiate level. I went to Henderson State University on a swimming scholarship and after a couple years, transferred back home, where I received my BA and MA in philosophy from UTEP, where my interest in promoting social justice flourished. Amy Reed-Sandoval supervised my MA thesis "On Racial Barriers" and trained me in Philosophy for Children (P4C) as director of the Philosophy for Children in the Borderlands program in El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
During my PhD program at the University of Washington, I continued to delve deeply into the topics of justice and oppression, a focus that broadened to include fatness when personal experiences with an eating disorder forced me to confront and challenge pervasive societal and medical biases. Even in recovery from an eating disorder, loved ones and my doctor at the time expressed concerns about me gaining too much weight. These experiences, combined with my engagement with fat activism and HAES principles, fueled my recovery and inspired my commitment to fat justice. This commitment is reflected in my dissertation (chaired by Sara Goering), which is primarily a response to the 'concern for health' objection that is frequently used in an attempt to discredit the fat acceptance movement.
Even now, as a Hecht-Levi Fellow at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, my focus remains on justice and oppression, particularly how these issues play out in medical care, biomedical research, and public health policy. My previous work, which critiqued the ways anti-fat values have illegitmately shaped the way we have come to understand "obesity," sparked my interest in research ethics. Thus, much of my current research has focused on ways in which research may perpetuate health inequities and how to design clinical trials in ways that promote justice and health equity, especially in the context of pragmatic clinical trials (PCTs).
While I take pride in being from El Paso, I’ve greatly enjoyed the cooler climates of the Pacific Northwest and the Northeast. Now, I live in Wilmington, DE, with my husband, Greg. In my free time, I enjoy hiking, cooking, watching classic TV show reruns, and I still enjoy the occassional swim.
Here are just a few examples of the Instagram accounts that helped me in my recovery and that
I think everyone could learn from.