In 2006 I began my undergraduate studies at the State University of New York at Brockport, where I dual majored in psychology and philosophy. In the Department of Psychology, I owe thanks to Dr. Lori-Ann Forzona, who is an excellent instructor of research methods. In the Department of Philosophy, I benefited greatly from the guidance and mentorship of Drs. Gordon Barnes and Georges Dicker. For my senior year, I studied abroad at the University of Oxford, focusing tutorials on personality psychology, philosophy of mind, and the history of modern philosophy. After obtaining my B.S. in 2010, I began work as a research assistant at the Mt. Hope Family Center. As a research assistant, I worked on a study investigating the impact of parental conflict and at-risk environments on preschool children’s coping and adjustment. At the Mt. Hope Family Center and the University of Rochester, I owe thanks to Drs. Patrick Davies, Melissa Sturge-Apple, and Mike Ripple.

 

In 2013 I began a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin co-advised by Dr. K. Paige Harden and Dr. Elliot Tucker-Drob. During my doctoral training, I developed expertise in applied statistics and became a core member of the Texas Twin Project. After obtaining my Ph.D. in 2017, I began a post-doctoral appointment at the University of Minnesota, working with Dr. Robert Krueger and Dr. Colin DeYoung. During this time, I also worked as a statistical consultant for the Center for Practice Transformation and taught research methods and statistics at Augsburg University. In 2020 I began working at Stony Brook University in the Department of Family, Population, and Preventative Medicine.

 

To date, my research has addressed a number of factors that contribute to mental health and well-being across the lifespan, including personality risk for antisocial behavior, particularly sensation seeking and callous-unemotional traits. More recently, I have been working on how to measure and quantify the impact of cumulative stress on cognitive health. I've also been exploring whether discrimination and demographic factors are associated with differential gene expression related to immune system functioning and modeling longitudinal patterns of behavioral impairments and psychiatric comorbidity in adulthood. Finally, I've been working with the World Trade Center Program using genetic data to conduct polygenic risk score analyses and Mendelian randomization studies of post-traumatic stress and cognitive impairment. In sum, I try my best to avoid intellectual and empirical pigeonholes by pursuing an interdisciplinary program of research that addresses a broad range of questions related to mental health and well being across the lifespan.