I am a McKnight Land-Grant Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. My primary appointment is in the Personality, Individual Differences, and Behavioral Genetics (PIB) program. I also hold affiliate faculty appointments in the Clinical Science and Psychopathology Research program, the Institute of Child Development, and the Minnesota Population Center. I received my Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology with a concentration in Advanced Quantitative Analyses from New York University, and I completed my postdoctoral training at the University of Pittsburgh.
In my prior work, I focused on how situations contributed to adolescents’ resilience against racial/ethnic discrimination. Specifically, I studied how the meaning and significance of discrimination varies when its come from different perpetrators (e.g., peers vs. law enforcement) as well as how adolescents derive unique information when they receive racial/ethnic socialization from parents versus educators. The rationale for studying how discrimination and socialization vary across settings is to inform setting-specific policies and interventions working to improve the well-being of all adolescents.
Currently, building on my prior research, I have begun examining how adolescents’ development of resilience today may reflect evolutionary processes that we inherited from our ancestors. In theory, biopsychosocial processes, such as pubertal timing and intimate-relationship involvement, have evolutionary-developmental underpinnings that were effective for our ancestors who experienced chronically stressful and uncertain environments. Building on this literature, my lab asks questions about whether such processes are adaptive in response to racism. For example, does pubertal timing offer youth of color adaptations that support their day-to-day functioning, despite potential long-term health risks? Other questions my lab is asking pertain to whether adaptations adolescents develop in response to one social hierarchy (i.e., racism) are similarly adaptive in response to another social hierarchy (i.e., heterosexism). Elucidating whether evolutionary adaptations that were once effective for our ancestors may not be similarly effective in response to structural racism or heterosexism can reveal the unique facets of today’s social hierarchies that require novel approaches to dismantle.
My research includes a series of first-authored publications in Developmental Science, Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, JAMA Pediatrics, American Psychologist, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), which have been featured in the Huffington Post, Forbes, and the New York Times. I have also received numerous prestigious awards, including a Rising Star Award and a Janet Taylor Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science (APS), the Boyd McCandless Award from the American Psychological Association (APA), the Social Policy Publication Award and the Early Career Award from the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA), the Palmer O. Johnson Memorial Award from the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and early-stage investigator awards from the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research (ABMR) and the Society for Biopsychosocial Science and Medicine (SBSM). I serve on the editorial boards for the Journal of Research on Adolescence, Development and Psychopathology, and Child Development.