About Me

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

I study mechanisms that perpetuate inequality. My primary focus is on housing insecurity—the uncertainty of affording safe and stable housing. Despite policy efforts aimed at expanding access to housing and widespread socioeconomic upgrading of formerly disinvested neighborhoods over the last two decades, measures of rent burden and first-time homeownership suggest housing insecurity is on the rise. While prior research sheds light on the consequences of discrete mobility events like evictions and displacement, I focus on why a substantial portion of Americans remains immobile: stuck in place and unable to take advantage of programs and policies. I approach this puzzle by foregrounding the enduring importance of structural racism in constraining people’s lives.

In my second line of inquiry, I investigate whether laws and policies, especially those intended to remedy inequality, succeed in doing so. Much of this work centers on housing policies such as tenants’ rights, rent stabilization laws, and homelessness prevention. I have also examined the effect of criminal laws, pre-clearance under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and voting rights restoration for individuals with convictions. I use quantitative (e.g., causal inference, field experiments, surveys) and qualitative (ethnography, interviews, focus groups) methods. My work contributes to the fields of urban sociology, law and society, stratification, race and ethnicity, and methods.

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 at City & Community and the 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 at the 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.