About Me
About MeI am a staff scientist and methodologist at the National Human Genome Research Institute. Previously, I was a postdoctoral fellow of the National Institute on Aging at the RAND Corporation in beautiful Santa Monica, California. I hold a doctoral degree in sociology from the University of California, Irvine. My research interests include aging and the life course, social interaction and network dynamics, and demography. My dissertation research focused on health and structural explanations of age differences in day-to-day social interaction. I am an alumnus of Professor Carter Butts's Networks, Computation, and Social Dynamics Lab (ncasd.org) where my work focused on organizational responses to disasters, improvisation in disaster response, and relational event modeling of social interaction. This lab research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research. I also taught urban demography as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Southern California. I have received several prestigious professional accolades including: the Matilda White Riley Early Stage Investigator honor from OBSSR for my paper with Laura Koehly titled Inter-generational Contact from a Network Perspective ; an NHGRI GREAT Award for mentorship; a best plain language poster from NHGRI (with my trainees Allie Rosen) ; a best paper award for Age Differences in Daily Social Activities by the American Sociological Association Section on Aging and the Life Course; selected as a finalist for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars program; received an Honorable Mention Public Impact Fellowship for my dissertation research from the University of California - Irvine; and, awarded the Order of Merit Award from the UCI School of Social Sciences for outstanding service to Graduate students as a health policy advocate. I am also a research fellow of Grantmakers in Aging and the Social Science Research Council.