bio

I am a Ph.D. student in the Brown University Department of Sociology, a graduate affiliate at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, and a predoctoral trainee at the Population Studies and Training Institute. My research examines teaching and nursing as caring professions, focusing on how teachers and nurses choose to enter these professions, how they make meaning of their work, and the interplay between workers’ own social identities and the demographic and organizational contexts of their workplaces.

I am especially passionate about applying sociological insights to practitioner/practice-oriented projects, which I have especially aimed to do in my collaborations at the Annenberg Institute. I have worked on multiple interdisciplinary teams conducting qualitative studies of teacher retention and school leadership in Rhode Island. I am also passionate about the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), a practice-oriented approach to studying and improving student learning. In partnership with a teaching professor of mathematics, I led four undergraduate research assistants in conducting a qualitative study of over a thousand students’ written reflections regarding their experiences in an intro-level college math course. In the long run, I am interested in continuing to use SoTL research to engage students as partners and to cultivate actionable strategies that disrupt systematic inequalities in higher education.

I also have used descriptive quantitative methods to study caregiving – these projects have examined the concentration of unpaid childcare time among parents who hold care work occupations as well as the prevalence and wellbeing of dementia caregivers.

I spend my free time practicing yoga and pilates, roaming Rhode Island with friends, and playing the guitar and piano.