I’m excited to be working on a new project, funded by Vermont EPSCoR, that bridges computational social science with interdisciplinary explorations of the relationship between social capital and pandemic responses. I’m working on the Saint Michael’s College team, alongside Krista Billingsley and Trish Siplon. Click here for more information about the broader project: “Harnessing the Data Revolution for Vermont: The Science of Online Corpora, Knowledge, and Stories (SOCKS).”

In the recent past, my research has focused on sex/gender, health, and fertility.

Sex/Gender, Demography, and Children’s Outcomes

Dr. Vida Maralani and I have a paper forthcoming in Population and Development Review where we examine mothers' and fathers' stated sex preferences for children and how these preferences are associated with gender gaps in schooling.

Sex/Gender, Demography, and Family

I recently published a “Trends” piece in Contexts where I write about the rapid rise of skewed sex ratios at birth in post-Soviet Azerbaijan and use historical data to make sense of this trend. The research for this project was funded by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant.

Genetic Risk and Reproductive Decision-Making

Dr. Rene Almeling, Dr. Shana Gadarian, and I published a paper in Social Science & Medicine, where we use experimental data to randomly assign individuals varying levels of risk for different adult onset diseases and test if and how this risk causes individuals to reconsider their future childbearing plans.

Sex/Gender and Health Behaviors

An in-preparation paper with Dr. Nataniel Lester-Coll studies gender differences in refusal of curative radiation therapy for non-metastatic lung cancer. We find that women are more likely than men to refuse curative radiation therapy. We hypothesize that treatment refusal may be a gendered health behavior that contributes to sex differences in cancer-specific mortality.