how to create a user experience research portfolio with zero experience (2021)
2021
illustrating and proving the laws of motion
how to make a user experience research portfolio with zero experience
2020
2019
2018
2017
being patrick nicolas jean ghislaine bauchau
catching social reality in flight
Alen Agaronov, ScD
Figure 1.

My art practice is summarized in Figure 1¸ above.
As a public health researcher, practitioner and educator, and a bioethicist, I am drawn to performative mediums in the health sciences, like "the conference lecture," "the science poster," "the webinar," "the IRB protocol," "the lab journal,” and "the peer-reviewed journal article." I bridge these scientistic mediums with the lecture-performance – an activist form of pedagogy born out of performance art – to investigate conceptions of academic subjectivity, scientific integrity, and research excellence.
My work on the “science-like” modes of self-presentation further extend into broader questions about expertise, professionalism, and career advancement, as well as “reinvention of the self” – analogous to the politically-loaded Soviet concept of the rémont, or the tireless, ongoing practice of home renovation and life reimagination. My video-documented lecture-performances of common job-seeking rituals like "the job talk," "making the work portfolio," and "designing the home-office" offer paintings of the expert's drift (or dérive) between formality, informality, and (finally) their cinematic collapse, to test the architecture supporting their individuality, self-assuredness, able-bodiedness, endurance and masculinity.
My practice is physically and symbolically shaped by disability, including the aids, supports, and templates, including PowerPoint®, Zoom Meetings, and data visualization tools, which are intended for more efficient and accessible modes of working in under-resourced health institutions. By commonly pair these office tools with their visual art equivalents, such as ready-mades, found footage, pre-recorded performance, a running theme in my work is digital technology's limits and potential in aiding the achievement of aspirational goals – professional, artistic and personal.
I work with my partner, HY Florence Lam, who is an architectural designer by training.
I completed my doctorate in social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health ('22), where I also pursued a secondary field in Critical Media Practice through The Film Study Center. My research on “para-performative practices” in public health interventions, based on the process evaluation of three studies from a complex systems perspective, was funded by The Mellon Foundation and The Spencer Foundation. I was previously named a New Civics Scholar through the Harvard Graduate School of Education ('17) and a Rose Service Learning Fellow ('19) through The Chan School. From 2015 to 2021, I regularly taught courses at Harvard College on aesthetics, idea translation, higher education, global health, medical anthropology, and social medicine. My interest in public science originated from my BS-MS studies at the CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College ('12).
I’m currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU Langone Health, where I am investigating the generation, interpretation and ethics of “real-world evidence” (RWE) as it relates to investigational medical interventions, or the Ethics and Real-World Evidence Research Project (ERWE).
Monday, May 2, 2022
New York City
