Bryce Puesta Takenaka, MPH

I am Bryce Puesta Takenaka, a queer, second-generation Filipino and Japanese writer, PhD student in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health, and a T32 Research Fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS. Moving through an occupied Hawai'i formed my research interests in grappling with the afterlives of settler colonialism, imperialism, racial capitalism, U.S. militarism, tourism, urbanism, and environmental justice on queer and transgender health. I am constantly drawn to questions and debates that contend how Black and Pasifika Indigenous queer and transgender geographies are created, represented, occupied, shared, transformed, and imagined as they coalesce with movements toward anti-racist, anti-colonial, de-militarized, and abolitionist futures. I lean into transnational epistemologies to inform participatory and radical spatial practices to illuminate how racial violence recalibrates through the built environment, which has progressed into skewed health inequities. I earned a Master of Arts (MA) in History of Science and Medicine from Yale University, a Master of Public Health (MPH) in Epidemiology from the College for Public Health and Social Justice at Saint Louis University and a Bachelor of Science in Public Health from Lindenwood University.