At the intersection of international political history and the history of science, technology, and medicine, my research seeks to answer two fundamental questions: how were scientific knowledge and policies transmitted between international organizations and different regions? And how did politics at international, national and local levels interplay with the categories of knowledge that were transferred or siloed? To answer these questions, I employ a multi-archival method, database analysis, and oral history.

Taking the analytical angle of the sociology of quantification, my first book “Statistics and the Language of Global Health: Institutions and Experts in China, Taiwan, and the World, 1917–1960” (Cambridge University Press, 2022) investigates efforts by public health schools, philanthropic foundations and international organizations to turn numbers into an international language for health, and how the Chinese republics reacted to this drive towards quantification. Currently I am working on a book project about rice knowledge and practices between Pacific Asia and West Africa (1960-1991). Thanks to the Swiss National Scientific Foundation-PRIMA professorship, my team and I are exploring rice cultures in the two regions through archival research and text-mining. Additionally, I am working on a set of articles that explore Chinese biologists’ trajectories in the 20th century and the shaping of the UN food and agricultural politics based on the Rockefeller fellowship database, which I co-designed.  

I have held visiting positions at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Harvard University (2021), and the Department of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at Peking University (2019). I serve on the editorial board of the French global history journal “Monde(s)” and have peer-reviewed for journals in the fields of the history of medicine, history of science, Science and Technology Studies (STS), as well as for the Swiss National Science Foundation. 

Mongraph

Statistics and the Language of Global Health: Institutions and Experts in China, Taiwan and the World, 1917–1960 (Cambridge University Press, 2022)

• Reviewed by Mary Augusta Brazelton, Social History of Medicine;
• Podcast by Harry Wu, New Books in the History of Science

Edited Special Issue

Santé globale: des acteurs négligés , edited with Anne-Emanuelle Birn, Monde(s), No. 20 (2021).

(Introduction  “Santé globale : des acteurs négligés, des histoires redécouvertes”, pp. 9–27.)           

Referred articles

(With Thomas David and Pierre Eichenberger)
‘In the Interest of Your Bank and Our Country’: Two encounters between China and the International Chamber of CommerceModern Asian Studies, Vol. 57, No. 4 (2023), pp. 1387-1414.

“Local Actions, National Policies and International Knowledge: Family Planning and Statistical Practices in Taiwan (1949–1980s).” Social History Of Medicine, Vol. 33, No. 3 (August 2020), pp. 819–842.

“D'un village à l'État. La fondation Rockefeller et les politiques de ‘reconstruction rurale’ de James Yen en Chine (1928–1950).” Histoire@Politique, No. 41, May–August 2020 [online: www.histoire-politique.fr]

“Making Standards to Quantify All Health Matters: The World Health Organization’s Statistical Practices (1946–1960).” Monde(s), No. 11 (May 2017), pp. 247–66. 

“外国卫生组织与民国黄金十年的公共卫生实验: 定县乡村保健系统与中央卫生设施实验处的江宁实验县 (1928–1937)” [Foreign Health Organizations and Public Health Experiments during the Nanjing Decade: Ting Hsien Rural Health Experiment System and the Central Field Health Station’s Jiangning County Experiment (1928–1937)]. 医疗社会史研究 Journal of the Social History of Medicine and Health, No. 3 (2017), pp. 156–75.

Referred book chapters

From Political to Technological Leader of the Third World: Chinese Exchanges with United Nations Specialized Agencies in the 1970s and 1980s” chapter the edited volume Divided Together?” International Organizations and the Cold War, ed. by Sandrine Kott, Eva-Maria Muschik, and Elisabeth Röhrlich (upcoming in 2025)

“Navigating between Political Authorities: Chinese Rockefeller Fellows in Biology and Chemistry and their Career Trajectories, 1949–66”, in Knowledge, Power, and Networks: Elites in Transition in modern China, ed. Cécile Armand, Christian Henriot, and Sun Huei-min, Brill, pp. 289-321, 2022.

(with Thomas David and Davide Rodogno) “Fellowship Programs for Public Health Development: The Rockefeller Foundation, UNRRA and WHO (1920–1970).” In Global Exchanges Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Contemporary World, ed. Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith, Berghahn Books, pp. 140–55, 2017.
 

Essays

Socrates Litsios, between internal and external history of the World Health Organization.” Global Social Policy, Global Social Policy Forum: Remembering Socrates Litsios: Reflections on the Legacy of a Masterful Storyteller. (Upcoming)

Review of China’s Cold War Science Diplomacy. 300 pp., tables, notes, bibl., index. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. £75 (cloth); ISBN 9781108844574. E-book availableIsis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, Vol. 155, No.2, pp.440-441.

"Data and Databases: Emerging Objects of Research.” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, Vol. 15, No. 3 (September 2021), pp. 395-401.

(with Jérôme Baudry) Roundtable discussion with Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva, Lisa Hellman, Kenji Ito, Helen Tilley. “Beyond ‘Plato to NATO’. Navigating the Global Turn in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine.” Monde(s), No. 21(May 2022), pp. 97-116.

Review of China and the Cholera Pandemic: Restructuring Society under Mao by Xiaoping Fang (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021, 326 pages) Medical History, Vol. 66, No. 1, pp. 90-91.

Historical Database

(with Ludovic Tournès , Pierre-Yves Saunier , Davide Rodogno, Thomas David , Mathilde Sigalas, Hannah Tyler, and Ahmad Fahoum)Rockefeller fellows dataset GDPR compatible; documentation of the database

Outreach activities

8 October 2022 (with Laurent Warlouzet, Dzovinar Kenvonian, Sabine Dullin, Patrick Boucheron): L’histoire globale est-elle globale? Les Rendez-vous de l’histoire, Blois, France.