About Me

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Lehman College, City University of New York (CUNY). I am also a member of the Sociology Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. I earned my PhD in Sociology from Columbia University in 2020. I also hold a MPA in Urban Policy from Columbia. 

My research specializations include race and ethnicity, social inequality, education, urban sociology, and law and society. In my scholarship, I examine the contours of racial inequality among youth in the American education and justice systems—especially as it concerns their interactions with authority figures. In my primary project, I study the role of trust in student-educator relationships, the salience of trust for student outcomes, and racial differences in trust among youth. This work draws on longitudinal data from the NYC Department of Education and interviews in high schools. 

In a second strand of my research, I investigate how youth manage involuntary contact with police officers and how they cope in the aftermath of an encounter. A third strand of my work surveys Sociology’s stance on inequality reduction and the discipline’s impact on this effort. This project has been especially valuable to my own thinking about research-driven strategies to reduce youth inequality. My research has received funding support from MDRC, the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and Trinity Church Wall Street.

I am transplanted  New Yorker originally from Morton, Pennsylvania. I am also a proud graduate of Cheyney University (the nation's oldest HBCU) and a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.