Assistant Professor of Anthropology Sana Saboowala discusses interdisciplinary research, building an anticolonial framework, and the importance of finding an academic community
Sana Saboowala
By Selene Lawrence, CLA Student Writer - June 3, 2026
From taking her first classes in undergrad to completing her doctoral dissertation, Dr. Sana Saboowala was never bound by convention. As a woman of color, her path to becoming a biological anthropologist meant navigating spaces founded on systems of injustice and exclusion. Instead of bending to colonial standards reinforced under the guise of objectivity, Saboowala challenged the status quo, developing a progressive approach to scholarship that bridged scientific discipline and critical theory. Now an assistant professor at the College of Liberal Arts, she’s changing the culture around how science is discussed in academic circles and encouraging holistic research methods in biological anthropology.
Saboowala’s interest in anthropology began early in her life. As a child, she found herself immersed in National Geographic magazines, fascinated by human origins and early culture. In high school, her passion for the subject continued to grow, as did her aptitude for biology. While she initially regarded biology as a hobby, her parents encouraged her to pursue a science program in college. Saboowala did, but was determined to keep exploring the field that mattered to her most. She began her undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin with a double major in biology and anthropology.
Soon after starting at UT Austin, Saboowala was surprised to find pedagogical disparities between her majors despite the many commonalities the two subjects shared. “It was a struggle in the STEM spaces,” she said. “In my sophomore year of college, I really began to notice the ways that racism and sexism were showing up in how we were being taught human biology. Pointing that out in class created problems; I would get shut down in discussions. There were some cases where we were specifically talking about race-related health disparities, or talking about human attraction but not acknowledging the LGBTQ community. It became clear that these questions of critical theory, things like race and social justice, were not addressed at all in science classrooms. These are real issues of power that are shaping the way we see the world in science, but bringing those concepts up and how they play a role in our lived experiences was shut down as being not objective.”
Determined to find a space that allowed her to explore the intersections between systemic injustice and science education and research, Saboowala resisted the pressures to conform. An opportunity presented itself soon enough: UT Austin launched its own chapter of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, a program for students from historically underrepresented backgrounds who are interested in becoming professors. Saboowala joined her school’s very first cohort. “I was really lucky to be a part of it,” she said. “I had a lot of support from other people of color, especially women of color. I'm still good friends with many of the people I met through the Mellon program, and I really relied on that community later on whenever grad school got hard. That group helped me be bold in my research goals and in including critical theory in STEM discussions.” As a part of the fellowship program, Saboowala took part in two research opportunities that would shape not only the trajectory of her career, but also her development as an interdisciplinary scholar.
Through her biology major, Saboowala enrolled in an honors program for science students to create a personalized humanities minor. Drawing on her experience working as a tour guide at the Houston Museum of Natural Science during high school, she designed a minor and an undergraduate thesis in museum studies. Her thesis, an ethnography of the museum’s Egyptology exhibit, focused on narratives around displaying human remains and how orientalism can manifest in museum spaces. The experience introduced her to a community of peers and mentors that, beyond sharing her academic values, truly encouraged her work. “That was where I met other STEM students who were interested in thinking about science beyond the conventions of our discipline,” Saboowala recalled. “The STEM professors through that program were way more open to talking about interdisciplinarity and what that could offer. It was an eye-opening project for me.” Beyond her museum studies track, the fellowship program also enabled Saboowala to contribute to research in biological anthropology, which she would continue to pursue for her Ph.D. The project she worked on, led by an anthropology graduate student, measured epigenetic expression among people in 9th to 12th-century Peru. Through this opportunity, Saboowala was introduced to epigenetics, the study of changes (often triggered by external stressors) in the expression of hereditary gene sequences.
“Epigenetics looks at chemical biomarkers that change over time,” Saboowala explained. “The world around us is shaping our bodies, and your lived experience can change the expression of these biomarkers. It’s an avenue to explore how society and the body interact. That research was really formative in thinking about how we can ask feminist questions in science, how we can ask questions about power, how power can affect our bodies, and how we can do community-informed research, all things that have shaped the work that I'm doing now. Both of those projects really helped me conceptualize how a lot of our questions about science and objective fact are based in histories of colonialism. Now, as an educator, I'm trying to make room for those discussions and to encourage students to feel confident bringing this up in spaces where it's not frequently talked about. That's what I hope students walk away with from the classes I teach, that they feel empowered and prepared to share their experiences with the weight that they deserve.”
By the time she graduated from UT Austin, Saboowala had hit her stride. Just a few months after completing her undergraduate degree, she began her Ph.D. in integrative biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There, she continued to explore value-driven and community-based scholarship while conducting research on genetic expressions of intergenerational trauma. Saboowala’s dissertation focused on immigrants to the US whose parents witnessed the 1947 Partition of British-controlled India into the independent countries of India and Pakistan.
In response to anticolonial movements throughout their empire, the United Kingdom increasingly mobilized divide-and-rule strategies to leverage existing social differences within occupied territories and promote imperialist rule. In South Asia, rising tensions between religious groups ultimately resulted in a British-led division of the area. In granting the territories independence, British lawyer Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who had never visited the region, was tasked with drawing the borders between India and Pakistan based on geographic religious majorities. Just one month later, the borders were finalized. The result was catastrophic: 15 million people were displaced, and the chaos and uncertainty brought about by the sudden border changes resulted in public infrastructure collapse and widespread violence. There is no conclusive count of the lives that were lost during the partition, but the casualties are thought to be between one and two million, with many more subject to brutalization and sexual assault.
Those forced to live through the atrocities of the Partition carry pain that is neither lost nor lessened with time. As with all trauma, the burden is passed to their descendants, possibly embedded in their epigenetics, and weighing, as Saboowala has found, on their hearts. In her research, Saboowala drew on anthropological methods to analyze biomarkers, combining the epigenetic data with oral history interviews. In her preliminary research, she found that people who reported experiencing distress during migration had increased methylation, an epigenetic marker, on a gene that affects the buildup of plaque in the arteries. These findings have big implications. Statistics have long established that South Asians and the South Asian diaspora are disproportionately affected by heart disease. “There are so many studies trying to figure it out, but very rarely are we asking people about their lives,” Saboowala said. “A lot of the time, we study biological variables in a vacuum, even though that's not reflective of the real world. I think incorporating more qualitative data and interviews into health research can help researchers understand the mechanisms behind the variables they’re studying. It seems to be the missing piece to a lot of the questions that remain.”
Though her dissertation is complete, Saboowala plans to revisit the oral histories she collected for ongoing research. “I'm really interested in how people talk about their health and how it affects the health of South Asian migrants today,” she said. “There are all these disparities regarding cardiovascular disease and diabetes, and we're seeing the same health outcomes across the board, even though there are so many diverse regions in that one demographic.” She has also been revisiting her dissertation’s examination of the lasting impacts of partition amid ongoing sectarian conflict in South Asia and within the diaspora. “I am still writing about Partition, nationalism, and how individual stories paint different pictures than national narratives regarding religious conflict,” Saboowala said. “Currently, I’m focusing on how communities remember helping each other and getting help. I am also working on a project with other memory studies scholars that is thinking about how we remember in science, specifically as related to the creation of ideas of "natural difference" and constructions of hierarchy and race.”
Outside of her research, Saboowala is working to create the class environment for her students that she worked so hard to find in her own journey. In January 2026, she joined CLA’s School of Language, Culture, and Society. She cited the university’s population of nontraditional students and the offering of a graduate-level applied anthropology program as two of the biggest factors that drew her to her current role. “I care a lot about doing work that is goal-oriented, impact-oriented, and community-based, so I was really excited to come to OSU,” she said. “I’ve been enjoying teaching a wide array of classes, and look forward to teaching ANTH 473: Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in the fall and ANTH 558: Science and Technology Studies in the winter. I am also currently developing an Ecampus course on media misinformation that I hope to offer next spring.”