About Me

I am an Assistant Professor of Medicine, Health, and Society, and Public Policy Studies and affiliated faculty in the Sociology Department at Vanderbilt University. I received a BA in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania, and MA and PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University. Before joining MHS, I was a Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My research focuses on better understanding the role of early life environments in shaping health across the life course. I integrate social, contextual, and biological data from population-based longitudinal studies to examine how inequalities in the social environment get under the skin to create health disparities. My research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Fulbright Program, and published in Demography, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, and Social Forces.