I graduated from Indiana University in 2017 with a BS in Human Biology and a minor in Anthropology. Upon graduation, I served as an AmeriCorps VISTA and served low resource communities to decrease the hunger gap in the greater Indianapolis area. This experience piqued my interest in the relationship between food insecurity and child health and widened my knowledge on the existing social inequalities in the United States.

Broadly, my PhD research focuses on food insecurity and child nutritional outcomes within the foster care system. I am particularly interested in how nutritional status may vary dependent on child placement in kin or non-kin foster homes. Moreover, I’m interested in child-centered methodologies that elicit a child's lived experience with food (in)security and their perspectives on the nutritional landscape in which they are reared.