About

I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Emory University, where I am also an affiliate of the Department of Data and Decision Sciences. My research uses the cases of education and sexuality to understand how state policies and other national institutions affect the well-being and decisions of immigrants.

My dissertation examines the academic outcomes of migrant children. Migrants often leave their countries of origin in the hope of securing better lives for their children, yet direct evaluations of this claim are rare. While most studies of immigrant education compare immigrants to native-born counterparts in the host country, my dissertation argues that, if we want to know how well young immigrants are doing from the point of view of immigrants themselves, we should instead ask how their lives diverge from counterparts who stayed behind in their countries of origin. By placing the researcher in the perspective of the immigrants themselves, this approach allows a more holistic evaluation of the political and sociodemographic circumstances that promote or inhibit immigrant children’s academic success.  

My dissertation also brings attention to an understudied but important group. The United Nations estimates that there are over 280 million migrants in the world today, and between 15 and 50 percent of these will return to their countries of birth. Accompanying these returning migrant parents are millions of children born abroad about whom we know surprisingly little. My dissertation asks: Do these students struggle to adapt to a society and school system both foreign and familiar, or are they able to capitalize on their binational experience and resources to thrive? In one chapter recently published at Population Research and Policy Review, I analyze Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test scores of a sample of the over 500,000 U.S.-born children of return migrants in Mexico. In another chapter, I assess how institutional factors are related to PISA scores for foreign-born children of return migrants in 72 birth countries and 43 countries of residence. The final chapter compares migrant children and stay-at-homes more broadly to estimate an effect of migrating on adolescents’ test scores.

I have also embarked on a major additional research project on queer migration. In the U.S., numbers of immigrants in same-sex couples have doubled in the past decade, yet little work has examined lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) immigrants at a national level. This increasingly important group constitutes an ideal test case to consider how the interaction between changing laws and culture can influence both migration and union decisions. Are these immigrants disadvantaged and fleeing anti-LGB contexts, or are they empowered to migrate and form same-sex unions by progressive origin-country LGB policy? I recently published the first results of this project in Social Forces and in International Migration Review, co-authored with Kristopher Velasco. We have also conducted a conjoint survey experiment assessing Americans’ attitudes toward lesbian and gay immigrants.

I also engage in methodological work with the aim of educating social scientists in advanced statistics and machine learning. For the thesis for my MS in statistics, I present an introduction to and evaluation of double robust machine learning methods. Double robust methods for flexible covariate adjustment in causal inference have proliferated in recent years, yet they remain underutilized by social scientists. My thesis is a guide to the most influential of these methods, and it compares them to more traditional statistical methods using simulations and real-world data. I presented this paper at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, and it won the ASA Methodology Section’s 2024 Clifford Clogg Award for Best Graduate Student Paper.

I have published additional sole-authored papers on immigrant education: one on Eastern Europeans in Western Europe in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and another on children of immigrants in the United Kingdom in British Educational Research Journal. I have also collaborated on two published articles on immigrants’ fears of deportation: one on Latino immigrants in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and another on the relationship between legal status and deportation fears among immigrants more broadly in Ethnic and Racial Studies. Ongoing collaborative work examines the naturalization processes of early 20th-century European immigrants.

Born in Rochester, New York, I grew up in Overland Park, Kansas, and attended the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where I majored in French and cello performance. After graduating in 2013, I taught English in Belgium on a Fulbright grant before securing a job as Program Manager in the Fulbright office in Brussels. In 2016-2017 I completed a master’s in Social Policy and Social Research at University College London’s Institute of Education, and in 2024 I obtained an MS in Statistics at UCLA. In 2025 I graduated from UCLA with a PhD in Sociology.