Alex, Chuan Hao, or 陳雋昊,

is a MD/PhD candidate at the Perelman School of Medicine. He completed his anthropology PhD in 2023 at the University of Pennsylvania and holds a Master in Design Studies with a concentration in Risk and Resilience from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University as well as a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University.

His projects explore how space, culture, and health interplay to create new understandings and criticisms of modern biomedicine. With an overarching emphasis on illness and infrastructures of care, his areas of interest include power relations, communities, digital media, epistemologies, and space-body relations. Running different disciplines into each other, Alex draws upon textual and visual techniques to construct new narratives in the pursuit of these goals.

He has worked for the Penn Museum, the Science, Religion, and Culture Program at the Harvard Divinity School, and the Health and Places Initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He also works as a freelance graphic designer.

A Catalog of Habitual Contours is a collection of Alex's investigations. Habitual refers to both Pierre Bourdieu's concept of everyday cultural practices as well as the continuous refashioning of thought that occurs through the projects. Contours refer to the making of lines (words and images) in the attempt to understand phenomena. These two highlight the ethos and methodology of the portfolio, one that recognizes the human condition as a foundational departure point and attempts to critically rework familiar ways of knowing.