About me
Dr. Yaya Ren is a medical and cultural anthropologist and social entrepreneur with expertise in the field of social interaction, ritual design thinking, and personhood and identity. Her work and deep insights have been applied to a wide range of areas including parent-child interactions, child development, health care, consumer culture, mobile technology applications, education, and community building.
She is passionate about technologies that nurture meaningful in-person interactions, never in replacement of them. She and her team work on creating nurturing technologies (“nurture tech”) anchored by anthropology. She leads the social- benefit health start-up PreeMe+You, working with medical teams to improve infant outcomes, parenting stress, and address health disparities.
As a Fulbright scholar, she conducted fieldwork with families and medical teams in neonatal intensive care units in Taiwan and the United States, addressing issues of premature birth trauma, maternal mental health, and medical interactions and communications.
Her social science work has been recognized by the Sloan Foundation Award, National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Fulbright Foundation, and Fulbright-Hayes Foundation.
On a personal note, Yaya will always procrastinate for a spontaneous chat, especially if it involves a beverage and a sweet. She also loves any potluck gathering, and is always exhilarated when someone gives her an instant-pot recipe:
