Welcome! I am currently a NICHD F32 Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford’s Center on Early Childhood, mentored by Drs. Phil Fisher, Jelena Obradović, and Willem Frankenhuis. I received my PhD in developmental psychology from University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development in 2023 under the mentorship of Drs. Dan Berry and Katie Thomas. Prior to my doctoral training, I received a B.S. in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego, an M.A. in psychology from Columbia University, and worked for several years as a lab manager for Drs. Clancy Blair and Cybele Raver at New York University.

My research examines how the type and timing of experiences associated with growing up in poverty alter children’s cognitive, learning, and self-regulation development. I take a strength-based developmental approach that focuses on identifying adaptive responses to poverty-related experiences. I draw upon a range of statistical and computational methods to examine these links across levels of behavior, physiology, and the brain.

This research was initially motivated by my own experiences of growing up below the poverty line, where I witnessed the constellation of daily stressors, opportunities, and constraints that uniquely shape how children learn from and engage with their environments. I strive to humanize these complex and nuanced experiences and understand their association with children’s developing cognitive skills, learned strategies, and regulatory capacities. To do that, I apply socioculturally-appropriate measurement practices (e.g., measurement (non)invariance testing, adapted tasks/methods, mixed methods) to build more credible conclusions about what matters for whom (i.e., different racial and cultural groups), why (i.e., structural inequities), and in what ways (i.e., what is an optimal outcome and when). This work aims to amplify the voices and needs of economically marginalized children to better inform the design of culturally responsive policies and educational curricula.