Natali Valdez

Natali Valdez is a medical anthropologist and science and technology scholar who studies how race, gender, and power are enveloped into scientific knowledge production. She draws from Black and postcolonial feminist science studies to qualitatively study epigenetic and postgenomic conceptions of the environment in social and biological (re)production. Her award-winning book, Weighing the Future: Race, Science and Pregnancy Trials in the Postgenomic Era (University of California Press, 2022), is the first ethnography of ongoing pregnancy trials in the United States and United Kingdom.  Her current and ongoing research interests include systemic racism, generational trauma, somatic therapy, big data, metabolic illness, and predictive medicine. She is an assistant professor at Purdue University, and this year she is a Presidential Visiting Fellow at Yale University. You can learn more about her at https://natalivaldez.com/.