
Role
As the Director of Service Focus, I help students connect service with their academic arcs and beyond. I aim to create spaces in which faculty, staff and students can come together to think creatively, collaboratively, and carefully about how service can inform life in Princeton, career paths, and personal life trajectories. I believe that sustaining our curiosity about the role of community engagement in learning trajectories, the place of the University in our local communities, and in developing best practices for the encounter of the two, provides a fertile ground to excite students, mentors and partners, to find the best avenues for sustainable collaborations.
Background
I am originally from Bogotá, Colombia and moved to the United States when I was 15 years old. I went to college in the City University of New York's Queens College campus, where I majored in anthropology and psychology. For my undergraduate thesis I investigated how my fellow undocumented activists in New York expanded the landscape of rights available to them. After graduation, I came to Princeton for a PhD in Anthropology. I finished my degree in 2018, completing a dissertation on internally displaced persons in Colombia. That project focused on how small-scale interventions - such as housing and health access - transformed life trajectories for families who had been forcibly displaced by the war. Collaboration with community partners is the bedrock of my research practice, and I have co-authored multiple books with Colombian artists, as well as curated exhibitions and public events that connect academic research with engaged on-the-ground action. After teaching in Rutgers for two years, I returned to Princeton to join the Global Health Program as a postdoctoral fellow and research associate, and the Department of Anthropology as a Lecturer.
Come Talk to Me About
- Your vision of service.
- How you connect academic pursuits, career visions, and life experiences with service.
- Healthcare as a biological, social, political, and historical problem.
- Peace, and post conflict
- Football (soccer, if you must)
What I’m Learning / What I’m Reading
Monica by Daniel Clowes and Feltness by Stephanie Springgay
Favorite Community Spot
Terhune orchards.