Bryce Puesta Takenaka, MPH

scholar-activist | queer & trans health justice | social epidemiologist

I’m Bryce Puesta Takenaka (he/him), writer, educator, PhD student in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Yale University School of Public Health, and a T32 Research Fellow in Yale AIDS Prevention Training Program at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS. 

Spanning the intersections of geography, technology, and health, my work addresses questions and debates related to the ways Black and Brown queer and trans communities imagine, produce, occupy, engage, represent, and move-through place. My scholarship particularly leads with intersectional and participatory approaches to explore these paradigms of experiences through health, the HIV cascade, and the underpinnings of structural violence. Through critical praxis and spatial methods, my work seeks to privilege community voices to forward anti-colonial, epistemic, procedural, and distributive justice for Black and Brown queer and trans people. My commitment to being attentive to and documenting the spatializations of deep colonial, racist, and anti-queer systems on the existence and health of Black and Brown queer and trans people are animated by the sheer community and imagination in both my scholarship and personal life.

I earned a bachelor’s in public health from Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri. Soon after, I started my training in social and spatial epidemiology and earned a master’s in epidemiology from the College for Public Health and Social Justice at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, MO. Alongside my PhD training, I am also pursuing a master’s in history of science and medicine in New Haven, CT.

How I’ve arrived here…

From the mauka to makai

I’ve arrived here through a convoluted path that began in pre-gentrified Liliha and Kalihi-Kapālama to the ahupua’a of Honouliuli (present-day Ewa Beach) on the Island of O’ahu, Hawai’i. Soon after, I found myself crossing the Pacific to Ogden, Utah, and not long after transiting to St. Charles, Missouri. Remaining in the St. Louis area for post-grad was met with a farewell and settled in New Haven, Connecticut. I come from and belong to many places, and I have a habit of seeing the world and occupying it through these peripheries.

My interest in the interplay between geography, technology, and health can be traced back to the crossroads of my lineage, where my family immigrated from the Philippines and Japan during different periods of Hawai’i’s colonial Plantation migration. Now residing in the U.S. illegally occupied Hawai’i on the Islands of O’ahu and Maui, their stories of movement and the spaces they’ve created ignited my inquisitiveness of how these geographies are shared. My ‘ohana is where my intellectual genealogy began, the soil that continues to nourish my scholarship on the entanglements of ethnorace, sexuality, gender, class, location, and health, the pinnacle to most questions and curiosity that come to me naturally. They showed me the way to imagine (and re-imagine), to challenge how things are often done, that innovation is a quotidian thing, and that anyone and everyone is capable of creating and sharing those tools.