Tell us about yourself.
I’m an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department and an affiliate of the interdisciplinary Global Public Health Program. I studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in psychology and biochemistry for my undergraduate degree. I was interested in medicine until I learned about public health as a field and the potential for conducting research that can effect change at the structural level rather than at the individual level. When I interned with a community development nonprofit, I realized that I was primarily interested in the ways that social identities and social interactions in daily life can get under the skin to impact people’s health. I became interested in these processes during adolescence, a period when youth are especially sensitive to social experiences and developing their social identities. I volunteered in a lab with Vanessa Volpe, who encouraged me to pursue a PhD, and then I pursued training in development and health psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles under the mentorship of Drs. Andrew Fuligni and Theodore Robles. I completed my postdoctoral training at The Pennsylvania State University to gain experience studying substance use and prevention science. My lab is now focused on using psychobiological measures to characterize how differences in stress and stress responses can contribute to health disparities during adolescence and young adulthood, as well as the ways to protect against poorer health. I’m interested in characterizing varied types of daily stressors and cultural assets, with a growing interest in how civic engagement can serve as both a stressor and a protective factor for varied individuals.
Can you tell us about how your work contributes to DEI efforts, whether it be in your community, research, service, or teaching?
At UCLA I led a popular psychology blog called Psychology in Action, for which the graduate students wrote blogs that were intended to be jargon-free so that they could be understood by a wide audience. I’ve been able to use some of these blogs as a resource for understanding material in my courses. I also led outreach events to teach students at local high schools about psychology, explaining my own experiences with financial aid so that students are not discouraged about financial barriers. In my research, I strive to recruit diverse samples in order to promote generalizability of findings regarding stress and health and to address research questions that may be most relevant to these groups. My research program centers on the impact of social status on stress responses and daily experiences among diverse populations, accounting for stressors unique to each population. I consider it a responsibility for faculty across all areas of their work to reduce barriers to science and higher education, as these efforts will create greater representation and diversity in psychologicalscience and thereby promote a more equitable society.
What made you choose UC Santa Cruz and in particular, the UCSC psychology department?
This position was particularly compelling to me because of the affiliation with Global Community Health. Public health (with the understanding that local and global health are inevitably intertwined) enabled me to discover psychology, and I am excited to be able to bring these two fields together for undergraduate students. I also appreciate the developmental area’s commitment to social issues and culturally sensitive approaches to research. Several faculty share a common interest in the lived experiences of youth, which I consider central to my research. I think developmental psychology as a field is reckoning with how to thoughtfully address racial and ethnic differences, and I felt that my research and consideration of diversity would be appreciated here. In addition to this department, California more generally provides a place where I can feel safe in both my research and my personal life. It’s important to acknowledge that more recently we are seeing increasing limitations on the types of research that people can safely conduct in specific parts of the country, with people often unable to safely conduct research in the areas that are most in need.
What can the department/campus do to help sustain the work that you do?
Psychobiological work can be challenging because it often involves procedures that are intimidating for youth, large specialized teams for collection and analysis of data, and large infrastructure for storing samples. On-site facilities for storing and handling samples can ease this process, as can resources that allow us to reach out to distant communities for whom this research might be most relevant. People often view psychobiology and subjective or qualitative assessments as incongruent because of narratives that psychobiology can assess more objective or concrete aspects of health or lived experience. I think that this false dichotomy ignores the advantages and limitations to each approach and causes people to silo themselves and limit their own capacity for collaboration and research. Being open-minded about learning diverse approaches beyond their field’s norms and challenging false conventions can promote a more unified and enriching research environment.
What action do you recommend to others in relation to DEI? What kind of advice would you give to others who want to get more involved in DEI related work?
I entered research because I felt that findings that I was learning in class didn’t represent my lived experience, and I noticed that immigrant and Arab populations were often excluded from research. I encourage trainees to question whether they might expect study findings to generalize to other populations and to think deeply about how mechanisms could shift due to cultural and societal differences in how groups are treated. I’m often asked how people can appropriately include sociodemographic variables in their analysis, with people citing guidelines about how these variables should always be treated (e.g., effect vs dummy coding). People should thoughtfully consider these variables with the care they consider any other variables in their analysis, rather than looking for a one-size-fits-all approach for addressing these constructs in their research. There is a long debate about whether having a diverse sample necessitates examining differences across groups, and I challenge individuals when they are designing their own studies or reviewing other work to carefully consider why these differences might emerge. Finally, people should deeply consider whether a variable they are studying is tapping into the pathway that they intend–that is, if interested in cultural differences, measuring specific facets of cultural values so that the rich heterogeneity of levels within an ethnic group can be properly assessed.