I am currently a Research Assistant Professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy and an affiliated researcher with the UChicago Consortium on School Research and the Los Angeles Education Research Institute.

Before USC, I completed a postdoc at UChicago and a Ph.D. in Sociology & Social Policy at Harvard, where I was also a doctoral fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy and a Meyer Fellow in the Joint Center for Housing Studies.

My research examines how transformations in urban social infrastructure and shifts in urban sociodemographics reshape— and often reproduce— inequalities, along the lines of race/ethnicity, class, cognitive skills, and socioemotional health. 

I take a broad, multilevel view of urban social infrastructure— ranging from digital information systems and broadband access to school enrollment policies, environmental remediation schemes, and housing interventions— and theorize how these infrastructural shifts operate as a key institutional mechanism shaping inequalities in opportunity, particularly among children.

By probing how these shifts alter patterns of residential and school sorting, exposure to risks and resources, and the tempo of cognitive and socioemotional development, my work— at the intersection of urban sociology, stratification, and social policy— develops a novel multiscalar and multigenerational account of how urban inequality evolves across time and place, using 21st-century Los Angeles County as a theoretically strategic case.

My sole- and coauthored work based on this agenda has been published or is forthcoming in Annual Review of Sociology, Demography, Social Forces, Child Development, Journal of Health & Social Behavior, American Educational Research Journal, Urban Studies, Urban Affairs Review, Housing Policy Debate, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, JAMA Network Open, Environment International, The Gerontologist, RSF: Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, and Proceedings of the ACM Internet Measurement Conference . 

As a Principal Investigator, I have secured nearly $1 million of external funding from sources that include the National Alliance to End Homelessness, Conrad R. Hilton Foundation, Weingart Foundation, L.A. County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency, First5 Los Angeles, the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, and the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. I am Co-Principal Investigator on another $3 million+ in external grants, from the Haynes Foundation, National Science Foundation and Arnold Ventures.

Prior to my doctoral studies, I attended Harvard’s Kennedy School, worked at the New York City Department of Education, consulted several national nonprofits, including the United Negro College Fund and National Audubon Society on their social impact strategies, and received a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics & Economics and Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania (summa cum laude).