Rico Kleinstein Chenyek is an MD/PhD candidate in the Institute of Communications Research and the Medical Scholars Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their major focus of study is in the social and cultural studies of science, medicine, and technology, with minors in Gender & Women’s Studies, American Indian & Indigenous Studies, and Latina/Latino Studies.  Rico’s dissertation, “Mediating Alterity: Transitive Indianness in U.S. Non-Normative Medicine,” is a comprehensive study of the U.S. institutionalization of non-normative medicine at the National Institutes of Health that centralizes the politics of (indigenous) alterity.  Rico is an affiliate with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and received a BA in Chicana/o & Latina/o studies from Pomona College in 2011.