Bio

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society (and, by courtesy, Sociology and Public Health); a Faculty Affiliate in The Center for Demographic and Social Analysis, The Center for Evidence-Based Corrections, and The Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy at the University of California-Irvine; a Research Affiliate in the Center for Demography and Ecology (CDE) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and a Member of the Racial Democracy, Crime and Justice Network (RDCJN) at Rutgers University and the Scholars Strategy Network. I have been a National Science Foundation Minority Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Washington, a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Demography at UC-Berkeley and in the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at UW-Madison, and a Research Associate at the National Economics Research Associates (in the Sampling and Survey Division), the National Board of Medical Examiners (in Operations Research), and Nickerson & Associates LLC (in Statistical and Econometric Analysis).

My research focuses on demography and criminology, broadly defined, with particular interests in fertility, mortality, population health, mass imprisonment, and social inequality. I apply and develop demographic, statistical, and mixed methodologies to understand changing patterns of inequality — nationally and abroad. My research has appeared in social science and medical journals.

I am currently collaborating on three projects. The first project assesses how mass incarceration has affected measures of social inequality and demographic processes (fertility, mortality, and morbidity) among subpopulations with the highest risk of criminal justice contact in America, which has led to the development of new demographic methods for multiple-partner fertility; new statistical methods for estimating mortality in differential population environments; and new sampling weights for national surveys that exclude marginal populations. The second project investigates how national, regional, and global patterns of mortality, morbidity, and injuries have changed over time. The final project is a multi-state mixed-method data collection effort to assess the legal history and social consequences of monetary sanctions across different jurisdictions within the United States, which has led to new sampling methods for dual design studies.