I completed a B.S. at SUNY Brockport. During my senior year, I studied abroad at the University of Oxford, where I focused on tutorials in cognitive neuroscience and the history of modern philosophy. After returning, I began working as a research assistant on a longitudinal study at the Mt. Hope Family Center, which examined how parental conflict and adverse family environments influence the cognitive and emotional development of preschool children. This work served as a motivational catalyst for understanding how social and environmental exposures impact mental and cognitive health across the lifespan.

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I completed my doctoral degree at the University of Texas at Austin, where I developed expertise in psychometrics, quantitative genetics, and structural equation modeling. After obtaining my Ph.D., I completed a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Minnesota, during which I also taught research methods and statistics at Augsburg University. After my postdoctoral training, I joined Stony Brook University, where I currently hold appointments as a Research Assistant Professor in the Program in Public Health and Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Medicine. Throughout my training and subsequent research, I have integrated theories and methods from clinical psychology, life-course epidemiology, applied statistics, and quantitative genetics to investigate how environmental exposures, biological susceptibility, and social experiences combine and intersect to predict mental and physical health.

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Recently, I have been studying the psychiatric and neurocognitive consequences of the World Trade Center (WTC) attacks, including the impacts of both traumatic and neurotoxic exposures. I currently serve as Principal Investigator of a newly awarded CDC/NIOSH R21 investigating the dynamic relationships between PTSD and cognitive decline in WTC responders, building on a previous R21 from the National Institute on Aging and my ongoing involvement in studies of cognitive impairment in WTC responders. In parallel, I have been conducting proteomic studies of PTSD, longitudinal studies of psychiatric symptoms spanning PTSD, depression, and psychosis, and genetically informed analyses using polygenic risk scores and Mendelian randomization. My broader research also involves developing statistical models of cumulative stress and social advantage to understand how psychosocial contexts shape cognitive aging, physical health, and well-being over the life course. In sum, I strive to avoid intellectual and empirical pigeonholes by integrating methods across disciplines to address complex questions at the intersection of environmental health, psychiatric epidemiology, and cognitive aging.