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.

As a scholar, I am interested in 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. My work contributes to a variety of fields, including political sociology, social movements/collective behavior, social problems, criminal justice, and race, and I employ a broad range of statistical and computational methods.

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 Advocacy Organizations & Policy Change, Collective Behavior & Social Movements, Justice Studies, and Social Problems, my students learn about the persistence of inequality and develop skills for creating social change.