About Me: I am 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 recently received several prestigious professional accolades including: 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.