About

I'm an Assistant Professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, where I study how interpersonal violence and minority stress shape the health of LGBTQ+ adolescents and young adults — and how technology, used carefully, can widen access to affirming support.

The through-line of my career is refusing to pick between people and methods. I trained as a social worker (MSW) and a social scientist (PhD) at USC, interned in psychiatric and medical social work, then spent years running large federally funded studies — including serving as Project Director for TechStep, a multi-site randomized trial for trans and gender-expansive youth, and completing postdoctoral training at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. Along the way I picked up an unreasonable fondness for longitudinal modeling, network analysis, and — starting with a chatbot named SHIHbot in 2017 — artificial intelligence.

Today my lab-in-progress runs on a simple bet: queer kids deserve research as rigorous as the problems they face. That means national cohort studies (SQuARE), validated measures, randomized trials, and AI tools engineered with safety architecture informed by violence research. It also means translation — every paper I publish gets a plain-language explainer, because the people this work is about shouldn't need a journal subscription to read it.

Off the clock: the design of this site is not an accident — I grew up with consoles and never quite logged off. Yes, there are secret codes — plural, now. One of them is older than I am; another is the word this entire website is quietly about.

Career timeline

• 2023 — PRESENT

  Assistant Professor, Brown School at WashU

  Tenure track. Chair of the Sexual Health & Education Specialization; leader of the SWAG GenAI faculty group; PI of SQuARE.

• 2022 — 2023

  Research Assistant Professor, Brown School at WashU

  Launched the St. Louis chapter: new collaborations, new grants, same mission.

• 2021 — 2022

  Postdoctoral Fellow, Children's Hospital Los Angeles

  Division of Research on Children, Youth and Families — TRUTH and Healthy Young Men's cohort studies.

• 2021

  PhD in Social Work, University of Southern California

  Dissertation: Complicated Relationships — sexual assault, dating violence victimization, and minority stress among sexual minority adolescents across the US.

• 2017 — 2023

  Project Director, TechStep (NICHD U19)

  Ran operations for a multi-site technology trial with trans and gender-expansive youth: protocols, safety monitoring, retention in "hard-to-reach" populations.

• 2016

  MSW, University of Southern California

  Clinical training: psychiatric social work (LA Unified arts high school) and medical social work (Kaiser Permanente).

• 2011

  BA in Psychology, UCLA

  Where the research bug bit: a study testing double jeopardy vs. social dominance predictions for sexual orientation and gender.