I completed my PhD in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2022. My research examines how racism is manifested in various institutions: non-profits, the education system, and even soccer. My more recent work investigates how "diversity" discourse and initiatives are experienced by organizational staff, and how they can, despite best intentions, reproduce the very structures they aim to dismantle

I see myself as a critical, mixed-methods researcher. Formally trained in quantitative methods from NYU's Applied Quantitative Research program, I frequently uses ethnography, participant observation, and interviews in conjunction with surveys and other quantitative methods.

My research curiosity extends beyond the academy. I am deeply interested in how organizations function as living systems: how decisions get made, how culture gets reproduced, and how people actually do their work, often in ways that diverge from what an org chart or process document would suggest. In my UX Research work, I’ve been particularly fascinated by the tools people use and how they use them. The workarounds, the informal channels, the way a team adapts (or resists) a new platform. These are windows into how people actually think about their work. In this newer world of AI adoption, that gap between how work is described and how it's done has never been more important to understand.

I'm equally drawn to questions of community and collective purpose. How groups of people come to understand what they're working toward together, and what products, structures, or processes can genuinely help them get there. This lens shapes how I approach product and user research — not as a way to extract data, but as a way to understand the full texture of how people experience and make meaning from their work.

Mentoring is where all of this comes together. I've been doing it throughout my entire career (formally and informally) and I've even published research on it. For me, mentoring is inseparable from my equity work. I've been lucky to have mentors who helped me see past formal structures to understand how things actually work: the unspoken rules, the informal power dynamics, the tacit knowledge that you either stumble into or someone makes explicit for you. Navigating my own transition from academia to industry drove that home. Women, people of color, and first-generation professionals are far less likely to have someone in their corner doing that. That's a gap I’m working to help fill. I also just love to win and love helping other people win even more :-)

I bring these perspectives to applied work in user and product research, organizational evaluation, strategy, and equity - designing surveys, building evaluation frameworks, developing data collection tools, and leading trainings on racism, whiteness, and organizational culture. I've taught college-level courses in the U.S. and Turkey as a Fulbright Scholar, and have adapted that curricula for organizational trainings and professional development.

I'm based in New York's Hudson Valley, where I live with my husband and my exceedingly fluffy cats, Benny & Silvie. When I’m not snuggled up with a book on the couch with my cats, you can find me in my garden, trying to grow veggies and all types of native flowers.