About Me
I'm a Ph.D. candidate in the sociology department at UCLA. I'm also an affiliate of the California Center for Population Research (CCPR) and a doctoral fellow of the NSF-IGERT Interdisciplinary Relationship Science Program (IRSP).
My work is driven by an interest in how families and social contexts influence inequalities in health, later life care, and wealth.
In my dissertation, I examine the "upward" intergenerational effects of children's education on their parents' later life outcomes. Although a lot of emphasis has been placed on how parents' socioeconomic characteristics affect their children, less is known about the extent to which children's characteristics influence the outcomes of their parents. My dissertation uses data from multiple generations of families in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to examine the costs and benefits to parents of having highly-educated children. The first two chapters investigate the potential benefits to parents of highly-educated children, specifically regarding their health behaviors, survival, and later life care. The third chapter looks at a possible downside to producing highly-educated children - the toll it takes on parental wealth.
In addition, in a series of papers on intergenerational caregiving in later life, I investigate which children care for older parents and how care for elderly parents is coordinated among siblings. Finally, I also have an ongoing collaboration with colleagues in the School of Medicine examining the effects of histories of social conflict and lifetime social and socioeconomic adversity on cortisol regulation in midlife.
Prior to entering the Ph.D. program at UCLA, I obtained a master's degree in statistics at Columbia University and worked as a statistician at Mathematica Policy Research and the Emory University Center on Health Outcomes and Quality.