Aihwa Ong is a well-known anthropologist specializing in cultural anthropology, globalization, and transnationalism. She was born to a strait Chinese family on February 1, 1950, in Georgetown, Penang, Malaysia. She received her BA from Barnard College in 1974 and her PhD in anthropology from Columbia University in 1982. Ong taught at Hampshire College from 1982 to 1984, before joining the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was the Chair of the Center for Southeastern Asian Studies from 1999 to 2001. She has also taught at other universities worldwide. Ong was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for the Study of Sovereignty and Citizenship (2001–2003) and National Science Foundation and Sloan Foundation funding for the Social Science Research Council and was invited to the World Economic Forum in Davos. She served as Chair of the Pacific Science Association’s US National Committee from 2009 to 2011, and in 2015, she was appointed the Robert H. Louie distinguished Chair in Anthropology. She is still involved in teaching, writing, and lecturing in international fora. In 2020, she was invited to be an SSRC Research Council Fellow. Her talk was titled “Cloned Monkeys and Gene-Edited Babies: Productive Uncertainty in China’s Biosecurity.”