Nooshin is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology. She is an anthropologist of the Census, and she studies the statistical construction of race as a semiotic technology that has shaped the politics of belonging in the United States. Her dissertation project, “On the Subject of the Census: The Importance of a MENA Category”, looks at the creation of a new reporting category in the racial designation section of the census for the classifications of immigrants with roots in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) by federal statistical agencies in the United States, particularly the Census Bureau. Her work focuses on three areas: social scientific theories of race and measurement, anthropological theories of the state, and scholarship on post-9/11 politics of recognition for immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa in the United States. Her methodological approach is a combination of ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and structured and semi-structured interviews. Nooshin’s research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Teece Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania Graduate Anthropology Summer Field Funds, and several travel grants.