Welcome! I am a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. I will file my dissertation in May 2023. My drive to uncover and disrupt the mechanisms of inequality fuels my research, teaching, and mentoring.

Broadly, my research examines how deeply internalized racial and gender attitudes are shaped by social factors such as political party affiliation and education. I also investigate how these attitudes fuel — and disrupt — dominant ideologies that help to justify social inequality. My National Science Foundation-funded dissertation bridges social psychological and sociological research on racial attitudes by examining anti-Black implicit bias. Social psychologists tend to identify the determinants of this bias in internal processes. Meanwhile, sociologists have largely ignored this important dimension of racism, focusing instead on explicit racial attitudes that are ignited by group competition. As a result, that we still lack understanding of the ways that broad social forces shape implicit racial bias. My dissertation, “The Social Roots of Implicit Racial Bias,” fills this gap by analyzing original survey data and Implicit Association Test scores from a sample of 380 white Americans.

In a past project, I examined gender equality attitudes in three Senegalese villages with varying exposure to gender equality development programs. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Jacob K. Javits Graduate Fellowship, and a Fulbright Research Fellowship.

My dedication to social justice also motivates my commitment to inclusive teaching and mentoring. In my role as Teaching Consultant at the UC Berkeley Graduate Student Instructor Teaching & Resource Center, I have led workshops on creating inclusive classrooms for hundreds of Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs). I have also led antiracist pedagogy workshops for over 1,500 first-time GSIs, and produced Covid-era videos on creating inclusive classrooms for nearly 2,000 more first-time GSIs. The quality of my teaching has been recognized with four awards including the UC Berkeley Extraordinary Teaching in Extraordinary Times Award. Further, I have mentored dozens of undergraduate students, most of whom have one or more underrepresented identities, and I advised graduate students in inclusive mentoring as the inaugural Equity and Inclusion Consulting Mentor for the Berkeley Connect mentoring program. In spring 2022, I was awarded the Berkeley Graduate Division’s Cynthia Ladd-Viti Leadership in Graduate Diversity Award for my contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion.

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