Nilüfer Akalın is a sociologist and Assistant Professor at Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University. Her research examines how immigration status, race, and affect intersect to shape access to healthcare in the United States. Focusing on Haitian immigrants in Upstate New York, her ethnographic work reveals how legally documented individuals continue to experience racialized discrimination in clinical settings, despite formal inclusion in health systems.

Her current research project investigates the emergence of data networks among immigrant-serving organizations through healthcare delivery. She explores how and why these organizations engage in multifaceted data collection practices, and how such practices shape both care provision and immigrant visibility. She is also part of a research project on the opioid crisis, which examines the influence of community-based activism in Upstate New York on official public health responses.
Akalın’s work has been published in journals such as Social Science & Medicine and Social Problems. 

She teaches interdisciplinary courses at the intersection of science, medicine, and society. Her classes encourage students to critically examine the production of scientific knowledge, the politics of classification, and the lived realities of structural inequality. She also collaborates closely with undergraduate students on research projects, viewing these partnerships as opportunities for co-creation, experimentation, and collective learning. The most recent project examines what is required to construct trust in medical encounters, based on interviews conducted with both U.S.-born and non-U.S.-born Black individuals.