As a sociologist, I am interested in Suicide, Mental health services, and technology.
I am a Portland, OR-based researcher and Sociology Doctoral student at the University of California San Francisco, working with the wonderful Dr. Howard Pinderhughes. I have content expertise in opioids, chronic pain, mental health, mental health crisis services, crisis text, suicidal ideation, stigmatization & discrimination, and social determinants of health. I have methods expertise in study design, mixed methods, and qualitative methods including in-depth interviewing, text-based interviewing, online focus groups, grounded theory, and thematic analysis.
My research has been featured in Health Sociology Review, the Journal of Addiction Medicine, the Journal of Ambulatory Care Management, the International Journal of Qualitative Methods, and the Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine.
My work spans three areas of investigation:
Suicide & Mental Health
My first area of investigation focuses on improving mental health services for marginalized populations. I have led two studies exploring suicide-related help-seeking among marginalized individuals. In the CPFSS study, I used Constructivist Grounded Theory to interview 20 participants, highlighting the stigmatizing impacts of chronic pain and suicidality. In the CONDUIT study, supported by the AHRQ R36 Dissertation Grant and UCSF Fletcher Jones Fellowship, I spoke with 39 young adults to find that young adults tempered suicidal disclosure given fear of escalation, perceived and reacted to perceptions of healthcare scarcity, and evolved mental health crisis service use over time as they gained experienced and maturity.
Health Services & Technology
Second, my work aims to understand and improve health services via policy and technological advancement. I have interviewed and conducted online focus groups with diverse healthcare providers to understand the implementation of a novel policy to reduce opioid prescribing. I have also studied young adults’ use of crisis text services, finding that young adults engage with crisis text services to exert control within what is perceived as a chaotic and opaque mental health crisis system. I am eager to pursue future work with particular interest in perceptions and experiences related to integrating technological remote tools with in-person care, how perceptions of privacy impact willingness to engage with technological services, and how artificial intelligence (AI) can be leveraged to improve care.
Research Methods
As technological tools advance it is crucial that social scientists level these tools to advance methodology. I have published a case study describing the use of asynchronous online focus groups for health care research and am currently writing in a manuscript comparing text-based interviewers to phone and Zoom interviews. For future work, I aim to explore the use of AI-assisted qualitative data analysis, comparing traditional to AI-enabled methods.
In my spare time, I can be found rock climbing, reading fiction, working on knees or some other deceptively hard-to-draw body part in an art class, baking something with a ridiculous amount of sugar, or most wonderfully, hangin’ with my fam.
