Adrian Van Allen is a sociocultural anthropologist who studies museums as technologies for organizing relationships between people, places, materials, and interests. Currently an Abe Fellow of the Social Science Research Council, she is conducting a comparative study of museum genomic collecting practices and policy in the USA, France and Japan. Her previous research has focused on connecting ethnographic objects and scientific specimens in natural history collections, examining their shifting value and the material practices in their remaking as cultural and ecological resources in the context of the Anthropocene. She holds a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California,