I’m a doctoral student in the Graduate Center’s Sociology Program. Before studying to be a sociologist, I was a women and gender studies student at Rutgers–and my interests (and heart) lie at the intersection of these two fields.

I currently work as an Institution Research Fellow at Macaulay Honors College where I work on a variety of projects, including the assessment of Science Forward, an undergraduate seminar that utilizes innovative techniques to teach students science. I am also working with the New York Food Policy Center on a project that assesses how East Harlem food environments have changed over the past decade.

Prior to coming to the Graduate Center I worked for Whole Foods Market as a Whole Body team leader and a marketing director. I helped to open new stores in New Jersey and New York, created partnerships and events with community organizations and led store tours and food education/cooking classes for children and adults. I also worked with the Intersect Fund and helped small business owners write business plans, develop products and grow their businesses.

My research interests include gender, sexualities, queer theory, food access in NYC, medical sociology, embodiment, undocumented immigrants and digital technology. I’m especially interested in studying how identities shift–and how these identities become enmeshed in (and are effected by) larger systems of power. I’ve always been keen on food–eating, cooking and working with it–and my dissertation project allows me to continue my work in this area.

My dissertation project is (tentatively) to study the effects of food environments in (East?) Harlem on low-income residents. I want to use two events–the closing of Pathmark on 125th Street in East Harlem and the opening of Whole Food Market, also on 125th Street in Central Harlem–as ways to ground my research in the Harlem community.  I’m interested in questions such as: How do racialized food systems work and how do they effect the reproduction of (un)healthy bodies? How does power circulate through food systems (supermarkets, restaurants, bodegas, school lunch programs), bodies and low-income communities? Can Whole Foods Market change/influence the way low-income communities eat? How does the closing of a local institution (Pathmark) influence the way a community not only eats, but also lives, communicates and works.

I also do lots of yoga, rescue dogs, and always wish I was swimming. You can also find me following the Cinnamon Snail around the city.

Imagine a veteran, home for six months, in a crowded supermarket, trapped in a long line.  Anxiety and frustration are mounting, the front door is a distance away, and there is no escape short of pushing through the crowd and getting to the door.  However, on this individual’s phone is an app with a module designed to diffuse the growing internal pressure before it erupts into dysfunctional behavior.  Many thought processes and behaviors are changeable; what is missing are accessible tools that can foster the desired change at the appropriate moment.

My project is the development of a mobile app that will serve as a new model of mental health care for veterans by expanding the current PTSD treatment paradigm to include self-directed, self-motivated discovery of a new civilian identity.  A mobile app has the potential to provide an immediate way for a veteran to navigate through negative feelings before being overcome.  It represents a psycho-educational approach to transition rather than a medically-oriented intervention framework based on illness, diagnosis and treatment.

Combat soldiers do not come home and simply turn off their combat personalities.  Transitioning back into civilian life does not mean veterans no longer carry the values of combat soldiers.  Rather, it means learning to integrate combat survival skills into new, less-threatening situations.  Many service members returning home face reintegration challenges that lie outside a PTSD diagnosis, and the differing kinds and degrees of their distress are often a consequence of particular difficulties encountered during their personal efforts to readjust to civilian settings.

Currently, there is little recognition of the developmental trajectory confronting veterans returning from war.  Instead, a single treatment model is considered sufficient to capture the wide range of emotional and behavioral issues confronting soldiers postdeployment.  The use of an app may provide a meaningful way for veterans to move beyond personal vulnerabilities as they struggle to fit themselves into a non-combative environment.

I believe that using technology to strengthen psychosocial functioning is natural for today’s veterans because as battle parameters have continued to disappear, new technologies have emerged.  They therefore arrive home with technical skills that past generations of soldiers did not possess.  However, they also arrive home carrying the burden of readjustment shared by earlier generations.  A digital therapeutic tool may provide a means for connecting new skills with old struggles, thereby enhancing resilience and leading to a smoother transition home.