I am currently a Research Scientist with the Fertility and Well-being Lab at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany.

I am currently researching inequalities in fertility, family formation, and maternal outcomes among immigrant populations using Finnish register data. I previously explored these topics as a Postdoc with the Family Formations in Flux (FLUX) Consortium, based at the University of Helsinki, and am now continuing this work as a Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. This body of work is intended to contribute to the evidence for social support and rights of populations that are differentially disadvantaged across the life course in the European context.

Additionally, I am developing a theory of micro-uncertainty and fertility decision-making based on empirical register data from U.S. restricted birth records. I am also currently working with colleagues from the BIOSFER project to examine the relationship between decreasing age at menarche and trends in age at first birth in Low and Middle Income Countries using Demographic Health Surveys.

For my doctoral research, I explored stratified reproduction, investigating the relationships between macro-level institutions and micro-level outcomes in inequality. My work has been published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Science and Medicine, The Journal of Sex Research, Studies in Family Planning, Contraception, and the African Journal of Reproductive Health.

During my doctoral studies, I was supported by the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies. I used intersectionality and reproductive justice frameworks to examine stratified reproduction, including novel research using in-depth interviews with young adult women during the COVID-19 pandemic to explore how uncertainty affected reproductive experiences.

I also conducted a critical discourse analysis of welfare reform debates in the 1990s that highlighted the construction of "unwanted" pregnancy as specifically non-marital and lower class; this analysis carries forward into today’s reproductive policy milieu with its extensive legacy (work is under revision).

Finally, I employed formal demographic methods and an afterlife of slavery framework to explore intergenerational inequalities in exposure to climate change, fecundity, birth outcomes, and the right to birth in the United States (work is forthcoming).

Prior to entering the doctoral program in Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I received a B.A. in Social Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2006, and an M.S.P.H. in International Health Systems from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. I also worked with the Population Council, USAID, Jhpiego, and UNAIDS before returning to graduate school.