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I am currently a masters student in mathematics at the University of Rhode Island, as well as a scholar in disability studies. Within disability studies, I have interest in neurodiversity and cross-neurotype communication as a form of cross-cultural communication, the intersection of queerness and autism, and the application of disability studies/justice perspectives in the STEM disciplines my formal training has been in, mathematics and engineering. I’m also generally interested in the Internet and other information technologies, especially as they relate to access to (creating and consuming) information for disabled people. I teach introductory level math at the University of Rhode Island and assist courses with The Art of Problem Solving.

I am one of the Autistic moderators for Parenting Autistic Children with Love and Acceptance, an online community aimed at supporting parents in supporting their autistic children as autistic children rather than attempting to push neuronormative performance. I am also member of Autism Women’s Network’s DIVERgent committee, which focuses on the intersection of feminism and disability.

I am originally from Boston, Massachusetts, living in Boston proper until I was nine and then moving elsewhere in the Boston area. As a student at the University of Rhode Island, I have lived in Kingston, Rhode Island for the past several years, and as a student in the International Engineering Program for Chinese, I spent the 2013-2014 academic year living in Tianjin, China (天津，中国) and studying at Tianjin Normal University (天津师范大学.)

I am:

  • Autistic: Everything I think or do is colored by how my brain/body/mind is put together, and the wiring of “me” fits with the autism label. The label is, of course, socially constructed, but every identity ever is, and this one is important to who I am. It is not a force external to me, and my experiences as an Autistic person navigating different parts of the world drive my research interests. If you’re looking for the common thread in my current work, my Autistic identity is it.
  • GenderQueer: This ties in with the autism too. Autism colors everything, including my relationship with gender. Both “autism has made me confused about (neurotypical concepts of) gender” and “lack of autism has confused other people about my (concept of) gender” are true statements, though only the first is typically considered. Either autism holds the spot where most people put their gender, or autism is my gender, and I am not sure if those are different statements or different ways of saying the same thing. I use sie/sier/siers as my pronoun set, with the “they” set and other gender-neutral pronouns as a second choice.
  • Queer: I experience romantic attraction nearly independently of gender. I am asexual.
  • A Complicated Student: I’m a masters student in mathematics, and I just finished my first year of being in the program full-time. I also just ended two and a half years of being simultaneously in masters and undergraduate programs in different majors, graduating with a bachelor of arts in Mandarin Chinese and  a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering in May 2015.