Research.

My research is motivated by a desire to understand and subsequently intervene on structural determinants of health to improve health equity. For a complete list of research publications, please visit my Google Scholar page.

Mass
Incarceration
& Health

Collateral Consequences of Criminal Legal Involvement on Individual, Family, and Community Health

Since 2020, I have been involved in and led projects on mass incarceration and health. The primary aim of my research is to explore the consequences of criminal legal involvement to better understand the development and persistence of poor health with an eye towards how structural interventions can disrupt the harmful effects of mass incarceration. My work highlights the need to understand the impacts of criminal legal involvement beyond incarceration. Learn more about it:

Colorado-Based Work

Bellwether Collaborative

Data & Methods

Intersecting Public Health Crises with Mass Incarceration

I worked on integrating disparate data sets to compare COVID-19 outcomes in prisons with the general population and then worked to understand the effects of prison transfers on COVID-19 spread and COVID-19 transmission between prisons and surrounding counties.

Since the pandemic, I have been working to understand the next crisis disproportionately affecting those impacted by mass incarceration: the climate crisis. This has included descriptive work to document the disproportionate exposure of incarcerated populations, and calls to action to focus on incarcerated individuals during climate disasters, particularly in the wake of the Los Angeles 2025 wildfires.

Mental Health & Substance Use Epidemiology

My dissertation work focused on the relationship between probation and mental health and on documenting life course patterns in criminal legal involvement.

Suicides are a leading cause of death in prisons, but reporting lags multiple years behind, which led to my academic work assessing suicide rates and suicide reporting across prison systems and an op-ed on the topic.

This work takes a community-engaged approach to explore the health effects of increasing criminalization of fentanyl and the substance use needs that individuals have when incarcerated in local jails and while on probation.

Innovative Data Sources & Methodologies

I work to provide more holistic and detailed data on the health of those with criminal legal involvement, such as through the Third City Project.

I take a critical lens to the methods and tools that health and social science researchers use to measure health inequities and work to leverage under-used methods and approaches from other disciplines, such as the mean cumulative count.

My training in social epidemiology prepared me well to study health equity. Yet, I believe that pursuing health equity requires a commitment to community-engaged research. This has included building community-academic partnerships in rural North Carolina around perinatal health and leading Photovoice with Black men who have sex with men in Durham, North Carolina around barriers to PrEP for HIV prevention.