I am an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice in the School of Public Affairs at San Diego State University. I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Irvine.

My research tackles questions central to cultural and political change. Specifically, I focus on how individuals and organizations shift dominant perceptions of contentious issues, and how policymakers and the public respond. Through my research, I contribute to a variety of fields, including political sociology, social movements/collective behavior, stratification, criminal justice, and race, while employing a broad range of quantitative and computational methods.

My research appears in American Sociological Review, the International Journal of Drug Policy, the International Journal of Press/Politics, Social Problems, Mobilization, Socius, and Sociology Compass, and has been presented to a variety of professional and non-technical audiences. My work has garnered funding from the University Grants Program, the Ford Foundation, the Center for the Study of Democracy, and the Data Science Initiative, and has won best paper awards from the ASA Section on Methodology and the SSSP Drinking and Drugs Division.

In addition to my research, I have taught several methods and statistics classes, including Social Research Methods, Statistics for the Social Sciences, and Graduate Statistics, where students are introduced to new and innovative methodologies. As an educator, I teach and mentor students from various backgrounds, and draw on their diverse identities as a way for them to connect to the material. My pedagogy centers on illuminating the process of social change by having students (1) critique commonplace understandings of society and social relations, (2) understand how structure shapes their own biographies, and (3) provide them with tools for analyzing the social world. Therefore, in courses like Collective Behavior & Social Movements and Justice Studies, my students learn about the persistence of inequality and develop skills for creating social change.