J. Cecilia Cárdenas-Navia is a PhD candidate in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. She earned a BA in the History of Science and Medicine and Ethnicity, Race, and Migration from Yale College and an MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Science at Darwin College from the University of Cambridge. A former National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, Cecilia writes at the crossroads of the history of science and cultural studies. Her dissertation, tentatively entitled “A Chimera of the Brain: The Sciences of Skin Color and the Formation of Identity in America,” traces the scientific, sociocultural, aesthetic, and political lives of the melanin sciences, offering alternate frameworks for discerning human difference. By disentangling “race,” biology, ancestry, and culture, it aims to emancipate skin color from its troubled past, lending to new understandings of the long civil rights movement, the genomic age, and the struggles that remain.