Research

Minority stress theory says stigma gets under the skin: harassment, rejection, concealment, and hostile policy environments accumulate into depression, anxiety, and suicide risk. My work measures those stressors precisely, links them to outcomes in large samples of sexual and gender minority adolescents, and tests programs designed to defuse them.

• Helped develop and validate the Sexual Minority Adolescent Stress Inventory (SMASI & the short form), giving the field a rigorous way to measure minority stress when survey time is short.
• Co-developed Proud & Empowered, a school-based intervention that significantly reduced minority stress and symptoms of depression and anxiety in a randomized trial.
• Found that state legislative climates are associated with minority stress and suicide attempts among sexual minority adolescents — policy is a health exposure.
• Documented elevated suicidality and homelessness among LGBTQ+ youth reaching out to crisis services, including distinct risks for transgender and nonbinary youth.

Representative work: SMASI-SF validation (2024) · Proud & Empowered (2023) · State policy & suicide attempts (2024) · Crisis services & homelessness (2018)

Most queer teens never see a relationship like theirs modeled — not at home, not in sex ed, not on TV. My dissertation and current cohort study (SQuARE) examine how sexual and gender minority adolescents learn what healthy relationships look like, and how dating violence, sexual assault, and newer digital forms of abuse shape their mental health. The field treated "violence" as one thing for decades; my work pulls it apart into types with distinct consequences.

• Identified monitoring IPV (location tracking, phone checking) as a construct distinct from physical violence among young sexual minority men of color — with its own substance-use signature.
• Showed that the threat to post sexually explicit images is a stronger predictor of suicide attempt (OR = 3.56) than nonconsensual posting itself — sextortion is a suicide-prevention issue.
• Found that socially assigned gender nonconformity predicts school violence experiences for both transgender and cisgender adolescents.
• Currently developing a validated IPV measure for LGBTQ+ adolescents — because you can't prevent what you can't measure.

Representative work: IPV types & substance use (2024) · Digital sexual violence & suicide risk (2023) · Gender nonconformity & school violence (2021)

Queer youth who can't access affirming care still have phones. In 2017 I co-built SHIHbot, one of the first chatbots delivering HIV and sexual health information on a public social network. I then ran operations for TechStep, a multi-site randomized trial of text-message and web-app interventions for trans and gender-expansive youth. The lesson from a decade of this work: passive digital tools get used once; conversation keeps youth engaged. That insight now drives my generative-AI intervention research — and my teaching and service on responsible AI in social work.

• SHIHbot (2017) provided early proof-of-concept that NLP-driven agents can deliver expert-vetted sexual health information in response to natural-language questions.
• TechStep showed tech-based stepped care is highly acceptable to trans youth, with mixed efficacy — the empirical rationale for moving from static tools to adaptive, conversational AI.
• Designing safety architecture for youth-facing chatbots: detection of crisis signals and "digital distress," informed directly by my violence research (e.g., discreet modes for youth experiencing monitoring IPV).
• Leading SWAG (Social Work Aligned GenAI), a Brown School faculty group on how generative AI is reshaping social work education, research, practice, and policy.

Representative work: SHIHbot (2017) · TechStep protocol (2020) · TechStep outcomes (2024) · Artificial Intelligence and Social Work, book chapter (2018)

HIV risk doesn't happen in a vacuum — it's structured by venues, substance use, trauma history, and survival-level barriers like housing and food insecurity. Through the TRUTH study and a decade of HIV prevention trials, my work characterizes the contexts where risk concentrates and where prevention (PrEP, testing, affirming care) actually reaches trans and gender-diverse young people of color.

• The TRUTH Study documented stark structural adversity among trans and gender-diverse youth of color in LA: 61% food insecurity, 30% housing instability, 26% with no place to go for healthcare.
• Identified PrEP disparities across transfeminine, transmasculine, nonbinary, and gender-expansive young people — prevention isn't reaching everyone equally.
• Showed sexual venue choice is linked to distinct risk profiles among substance-using men who have sex with men, and that sexual abuse history independently predicts negative health outcomes.
• Contributed design and analysis methods for sequentially randomized prevention trials with transgender adolescents.

Representative work: TRUTH Study (2022) · Sexual venue choice (2017) · Trial design methods (2020)