I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. I am a faculty affiliate of the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies and a member of the Emancipatory Sciences Lab network. I am also the Co-Director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect. I completed my PhD in Sociology from the Departments of Sociology and Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University in 2021, where I was an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Inequality and the Cornell Population Center. 

 

My research focuses on the causes and consequences of criminal legal involvement for individuals and families.My scholarship is grounded in three interrelated lines of inquiry. The first examine how criminal legal system contact shapes reproductive and sexual health and highlights incarceration as a determinate of family formation. The second investigates how systems of social control—including the criminal legal system, education, and child welfare—generate and sustain inequality across the life course, populations, and generations. The third takes an intersectional approach, exploring how gender, race, and disability interact to shape individuals’ exposure to punishment, influence how institutions respond to individuals, and ultimately shape trajectories. I am currently funded by a K01 award from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and was recently funded by a now-canceled R01 from NIDA. My research has also been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Fahs-Beck Fund for Research and Experimentation, and Policy Research Associates, among others, and has been featured in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Social Problems, the American Journal of Public Health, and Social Science and Medicine.

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One current project explores how incarceration history shapes sexual and reproductive health care. Leveraging interviews with providers and individuals with a history of incarceration, I investigate how incarceration history disclosures occur and how the stigma of criminal legal system involvement subsequently shapes care. These interviews also informed the design of a survey experiment I conducted with health service providers in the US, where I investigated how incarceration stigma shapes the perceptions and stated treatment decisions of providers. Together, this work suggests that incarceration history disclosures are common and typically directly from patients, and shape providers' perceptions of an otherwise identical patient's expected treatment compliance and trustworthiness and the care providers include in the patient's treatment plan. 

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