Hoa Francisco Ngo (2020)

For undergraduate, "Frank" Ngo studied cultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He completed undergraduate fieldwork in Kobe, Japan, on the missionary efforts of Opus Dei, a Roman Catholic institution, and explored questions of secularism, boundary/categorical transgression, and the concept of "culture" in Roman Catholic discourse. Afterwards, he spent 5 years in Japan where he taught on the JET program, earned his master's at Sophia University in Tokyo, and worked at a few interesting companies. For Ngo's PhD work, he returns to the Opus Dei as a researcher but with interest in other questions of secularity, time, religious hierarchy, and spiritual kinship.