About Me

Thanks for coming to my page! I am on the academic job market this year.

I examine mechanisms that undermine the state’s efforts to address inequality. My first line of research examines such mechanisms within housing. I reveal the individual, market, and institutional reasons why legal interventions like tenants’ rights and rent stabilization, though necessary, are insufficient to guarantee housing security. My second line examines the mechanisms for a set of democratic rights. I show how the right to vote and the right to access courts go unrealized through under-enforcement, misinformation, and spatial barriers. Across both lines I use quantitative (e.g., causal inference, field experiments, surveys) and qualitative (ethnography, interviews, focus groups) methods. My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and Stanford Impact Labs.

Published work

In earlier, published work, I study the relationship between gentrification and mobility. With co-authors, I argue that structural racism on the housing market is a more significant driver of inequality in residential mobility than gentrification by itself. This work has been published in City & Community and Urban Affairs Review.

My masters paper is a project on municipal annexations using analyses of Census place- and block-level shapefiles and Census/ACS demographic data across 2 decades. This work has been published in Du Bois Review.

In ongoing projects with collaborators, I examine the impacts of neighborhood-level changes to housing supply and tenant protection coverage on residential mobility. In another collaborative project funded through the National Science Foundation, the Yellow Chair Foundation, and Public Agenda, we use novel, “two-way” text messaging experiments to examine barriers towards voting among system-impacted people across the United States, in partnership with the Alliance for Safety and Justice. This work has been published in Punishment & Society.

• “two-way” text messaging means we send outgoing messages and reply to incoming messages

I also worked on a collaborative project using ethnographic observations and interview data across two courthouses in the Bay Area. This work has been published in Social Service Review.

Non-Sociology

Prior to Stanford, I was a research associate at the Brennan Center for Justice. I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in Sociology in 2016. Outside of research, I spend a lot of time with the various pets in my family, eating spicy food with friends, and reading for my (too many) bookclubs. I am a proud swimmer with the Stanford Masters Team.