I am an Assistant Professor of Health Communication at Minnesota State University, Mankato. My work brings together interdisciplinary communication studies, feminist science and technology studies, and cultural historical theories of learning in non-canonical educational settings in order to interrogate dominant medical epistemologies in healthcare training. Considering the complex process of incorporating a human patient simulation in healthcare training, my work examines how the human patient surrogate becomes a subject of social, cultural, and moral negotiations, one that is inflected by the social positioning of participants and by the organization of simulation as a teaching event in different institutional and historical contexts. Adopting a cultural studies approach to the analysis of collaborative practices in healthcare, my research works to strengthen a productive relationship between social science and healthcare training. My current research focuses on the transformative potential of medical simulation training for equitable health care, working towards opening new possibilities for what interdisciplinary research and collaboration can be, and what it can do. More broadly, my work contributes to research on activity systems and the cultural forms that shape pedagogical innovation, working towards facilitating development of a critical, cultural-historical approach to equitable education in my research and teaching practice. I hold a doctorate in Communication from University of California San Diego, where I also worked in the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (LCHC).