My research agenda focuses on how social factors like gender, close relationships, and culture relate to people’s mental health. In a society with significant concerns surrounding mental wellbeing, and where rates of mental ailments and disorders such as depression, loneliness, and despair continue to rise, this research is of particular importance. I draw on both quantitative and qualitative methods to conduct this research, including in-depth interviewing, survey data analysis, and natural language processing.

My dissertation uses in-depth interview data to extend understandings of the “despair” believed to be the common source of the multiple causes of death that form the deaths of despair epidemic. Prior scholarship on deaths of despair has been primarily quantitative and has not yet investigated the experiences of individuals living in areas affected by despair. I respond to this prior scholarship by investigating the meaning of despair to those who have experienced it, different ways that people who are at relatively high and low risk of despair understand their emotionally closest relationships, and the ways meaning-making processes may relate to negative mental health outcomes. My first dissertation-based article is currently under review.

My other research demonstrates an underlying interest in the relationship between social factors and mental health. One mechanism I am interested in that relates people’s internal states to their broader social world is core social networks. My work focusing on core social networks has been published in the Cambridge University Press’s edited volume, Personal Networks, as well as Stanford University’s “State of the Union” issue of Pathways Magazine. My co-authors and I are revising an article on the avoidance of close ties for a resubmission at American Sociological Review. 

My research is interdisciplinary, drawing on the tools and knowledge from other fields. While my research outputs are primarily sociological journals, my article on updating a social cognitive model of PTSD was recently accepted at Current Psychology and I anticipate another article will be under review shortly under review at Psycho-Oncology.

I hold degrees in Interdisciplinary Studies and German from UC Berkeley, as well degrees in Computational Science and Engineering and Sociology from Harvard University. I expect to earn my PhD in Sociology from Harvard University in May 2024.