I’m an Assistant Professor of Management & Organization at the USC Marshall School of Business. Prior to that, I was an Assistant Professor of Organization & Management at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. I earned my PhD in Management & Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
I study intergroup inequalities across a range of organizational contexts (e.g., police-community interactions, higher education, professional workplaces). I seek to answer several key questions:
• What are the psychological sources that lead to threat and distrust in community-police interactions?
• How can we intervene to lead law enforcement officers to more effectively build trust in interactions with community members?
• How do power disparities disrupt the formation of rapport?
Beyond intergroup inequalities broadly, my research on social class centers around:
• How do employees’ social class backgrounds shape the strategies they use to navigate professional workplaces?
• How can managers and organizations shift the cultures of professional workplaces to reduce inequalities?
I employ multi-method techniques in my research including field studies, interviews, lab experiments, surveys, archival data analysis, and text analysis. My research has been published in journals including Nature Communications, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. My work has been featured in the business and popular press, including Harvard Business Review, Politico, and the Christian Science Monitor. I’m the author of Psychology Today’s Inequality Interrupted blog, and also contribute to the Behavioral Scientist.
When I’m not researching or writing, you can probably find me training for road races, baking, and/or struggling through the Saturday NYTimes crossword puzzle.