Alberto E. Morales received his PhD in Anthropology (2019) from the University of California, Irvine and a BS in Biological Sciences also from the University of California, Irvine. His research interests lie at the intersections of bioeconomy, biotech sciences, global health equity, and the geopolitics of knowledge production. For his dissertation, he carried out ethnographic research among biotech laboratory workers and government policy officials in Panamá, where investments in science, technology, and innovation are invoked as sustainable forms of national development. In his current book manuscript, Morales draws on his interdisciplinary background in Chicano/Latino Studies, Latin American Studies, and Medicine, Science, and Technology Studies to analyze how precarity, absence, and hope are lived and experienced in technoscientific communities across Latin America and among transnational Latino populations in the U.S. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the Newkirk Center for Science and Society. At UC Irvine, he has taught classes on medical anthropology; global health; science, technology, and race; and Latinx and Latin American identities and social justice. Morales’ commitment to effective teaching has been recognized multiple times by the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies Office with the Outstanding Teaching Award. Morales has been experimenting with multi-modal ethnographic work in the last year, including visual and sensory/sound methods, and with innovative digital pedagogy to push the possibilities of transmedia and epistemic modes of engagement in research, teaching, and the expansion of the imagination.
