Mohammad Khamsya Bin Khidzer

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for History, Leiden University. Beginning on the 1st of September 2025, I will be a tenure track Lecturer in Medicine, Health and Society at the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, King’s College London. My research is interdisciplinary, and engages with fields such as the social studies of science, technology and medicine, medical sociology, sociology of race and ethnicity, history of medicine, and global and transnational Southeast Asia. I am broadly interested in how medical scientific knowledge is constructed, given meaning, and affect various spheres of society.

I am currently working on my book project examining race, diabetes and public health in Singapore between 1960-2020. Taking the ongoing War on Diabetes in the tiny island nation as my starting point, I trace the different ways in which diabetes emerged as medically, culturally and politically salient throughout its history while also attending to the different ways in which it becomes racialized. I situate my analysis within broader social, institutional and technoscientific transformations such as postcolonial nation building, Cold War developmentalism, the rise of multilateral global health organizations, advancements in genomic medicine and global/transnational health movements centered on decolonizing ‘Asian’ Diabetes. Parts of this research have been published in Science, Technology and Human Values and in East Asian Science, Technology and Society.

Aside from race, diabetes and public health, I have published an ethnography on transnational retirement migration in Malaysia, as well as a co-authored a paper comparing how ethnoracial communities in Vietnam and Singapore make sense of data from population genetics research. I have recently started two projects that seek to locate ideas and ‘things’ related to Southeast Asia, within a broader global and transnational network of actors, expertise and institutions. The first project explores the interaction between scientific and indigenous conceptions of ‘islands’ in Singapore and the Pacific. My second project examines agritech in Southeast Asia, specifically how patented, lab developed rice reshapes ‘rice politics’ in the region.