Claire was born and raised in San Francisco as a fourth generation Nikkei and Chinese American. She completed her undergraduate at UC Davis in 2019, with a degree in History and Psychology and a minor in Asian American Studies. Her senior thesis reexamined the history of Japanese American WWII incarceration through her grandfather’s lens as a Kibei Nisei under the theoretical framework of family separation.
After graduation, she became a HR professional in the healthcare space and joined the LCLO Group as a research intern to write and support the production of the “Defining Your Roots/Routes: Asian Americans in Higher Education” podcast series.
Claire is interested in intersectional frameworks such as queering, race, class and gender that reexamines the Asian American experience and provides unique perspectives of Asian American transnational histories that are often erased. She is also interested in how the histories of Asian exclusion and immigration policies have constructed identities, national security regimes, and social and political realities of belonging. At Columbia and LSE, she hopes to dive deeper on the impact of losing affirmative action in higher education within the AsianAmerican experience and how it may produce more inequalities and displacement across the Asian diaspora by tracing a global history of Asian exclusion, immigration policies and labor.
