1. Aihwa Ong is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, a member of the Science Council of the International Panel on Social Progress, and a former recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship for the study of sovereignty and citizenship.
Aihwa Ong is well known for her interdisciplinary approach in investigations of globalization, modernity, and citizenship from Southeast Asia and China to the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
Aihwa Ong is specifically interested in the connection and links between an array of social sciences such as; sociocultural anthropology, urban studies, and science and technology studies, as well as medicine and the arts.
Aihwa Ong was a visiting lecturer at Hampshire College before joining the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley.
Aihwa Ong was the Chair of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Berkeley, Visiting Professor at City University of Hong Kong, Visiting Professor at Yonsei University, and a senior researcher at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore.
Aihwa Ong was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for the study of sovereignty and citizenship and has been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation for the Social Science Research Council.
Aihwa Ong received the Cultural Studies Book Award for Flexible Citizenship from the Association for Asian American Studies as well as a prize from the American Ethnological Society.
In 2007, Aihwa Ong was invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Aihwa Ong argues that different systems that emerge as a result of capitalism, technology, and science proliferate Asia.
In particular, Aihwa Ong uses the example of the development of free trade zones to attract capital flows, describing it as a method of "graduated sovereignty".
Aihwa Ong starts by identifying the elements of citizenship such as citizen's rights and laws etc.
Aihwa Ong provided a collection of case studies on biotech topics including genetically modified foods, clinical trials, blood collection, stem cell research etc.