I am a sociologist whose research lies at the intersection of the sociology of work, economic sociology, and sociology of education, in cross-national, cultural perspective. I am a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University and completed a PhD in Sociology at Harvard University in 2024.

My research agenda broadly foregrounds how people experience and respond to uncertainty stemming from growing employment precarity and economic instability, as well as grapple with unexpected difficulties or conflicting beliefs, a topic of importance in a world unsettled by growing employment and economic insecurity, changing views of the value of education, rising inequality, and political turmoil.

I primarily draw on in-depth interview methods, supplemented by experiments, computational text analysis, and survey analysis. Much of my research takes a cross-national comparative perspective.

If a college degree typically propels a young person toward financial, professional, and personal improvement, as substantial research demonstrates, what are the experiences, perceptions, and strategies of those college graduates who are nonetheless struggling? My cross-national longitudinal project examines the experiences and consequences of insecurity—that is, employment precarity or economic instability—among young people with college degrees. This project draws on 164 in-depth interviews with young college graduates in the United States and Spain (2020-2021), 147 follow-up surveys conducted two years later (2022), and ongoing interviews conducted five years later (2025-2026 (expected)).

Two papers stemming from my dissertation, one published and the other invited to be revised and resubmitted, investigate how these young graduates in each country understand their social positions and worth and interpret insecurity in their contexts. Building on this dissertation work, I am also developing a book project that integrates my focus on insecurity and my focus on higher education to examine how these young graduates navigate their insecure contexts, including how they imagine their own futures and those of others around them, as well as how they strategize to move toward those futures and improve their own situations and the situations of others. As an extension of this project and drawing on the ongoing interviews, I am also developing more papers and a second book project.

My research, including work published at Administrative Science Quarterly, Work and Occupations, Sociology of Education, and RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, and invited to revise and resubmit at Sociology of Education and Work and Occupations, also demonstrates an underlying interest in examining how people manage tensions between seemingly conflicting ideas or beliefs, particularly in the realms of employment and education. Other research, including work published at The British Journal of Sociology, reveals a consistent interest in the role of culture in shaping American political engagement, particularly in tumultuous political contexts.

With Lorenza Antonucci, I am co-editor of a special issue of The British Journal of Sociology on “The Precarity of Work and Life,” currently calling for papers with a submission deadline of September 2, 2025.

I earned a B.A. in Sociology with Honors and English with Honors at Stanford University and an A.M. in Sociology and a PhD in Sociology at Harvard University. Before graduate school, I taught high school in Spain through the Fulbright Program.