I am a PhD candidate in Sociology and Demography at UC Berkeley. In the fall 2013, I will be a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at Columbia University and in the fall 2015, I will join the faculty of the Sociology Department at New York University.
I study secrets. I am interested in when and why people conceal information about themselves and others and the effects of these acts of concealment on social influence, behavior and attitudes. My work has examined abortion and miscarriage secrets in the United States and Americans keeping their political attitudes secret. My next project examines the revelation and concealment of cancer diagnoses.
The secrets work is a part of a broader research agenda on the relationship between knowledge, demographic processes and events and political outcomes such as attitudes, representation and advocacy success. As such, my work draws upon many different literatures.
I employ quantitative methods on large-scale datasets from surveys to vital records.I use both regression methods and formal demographic methods. I additionally have experience and expertise in survey design; for my dissertation I conducted a nationally representative survey of over 1600 American resident adult men and women. My work so far has focused on the United States. It has been featured in the New York Times and CNN.com and will soon be published in Population and Development Review.
My work and training is funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, Face Value & the Tides Center at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. I have also received support from the Helen P. Wolpert Foundation.
I earned my undergraduate degree from Yale University where I studied Ethics, Politics and Economics. Before graduate school, I worked doing social policy research for various states and municipalities in the United States and writing and communications for high-tech startups.
You can check out my cv here.
Thanks for your interest!
