Nice to meet you.

Currently, I teach Stress Management to undergraduate students and am a qualitative research assistant in the lab of Dr. Dong-Chul Seo. My advisor and mentor is Dr. Lucia Guerra-Reyes, whose work in medical anthropology has been an inspiration to me since I was a master's student. Additionally, I am honored to work under the advisement of two other committee members, Dr. Patrick Quinn and Dr. Jessica Lester. I am surrounded by incredible colleagues, staff, and faculty in the IU School of Public Health's Applied Health Science department, and I feel blessed every day to be living my dream. My values express themselves in my teaching and research as well as through activism. I am a believer in the strength of collective action, shared governance, mutual aid, and challenging systems of oppression. My faith background as a Christ follower and budding Quaker informs every facet of my life.  ​ I didn't start out wanting to be a public health researcher. As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a pilot. My undergraduate is in aeronautics and I hold a commercial and instrument fixed-wing pilot certificate, a private rotorcraft certificate, and an airframe and powerplant mechanic certificate. I worked as a tour pilot and flew fire patrol for a paper company on the coast of North Carolina before beginning my Master of Public Health degree at Indiana University, Bloomington. Aiming for a career as a humanitarian aid pilot, I completed an MPH in Behavioral, Social, and Community Health, hoping to contribute to the overall well-being of the places I wanted to fly. Somewhere in there, I pivoted. In the year after school, I set routes and ran youth programs as the head climbing coach at Hoosier Heights Bloomington, a continuation of work I was doing before graduation. Something of a "gap year," this gave me space to think through my goals and consider other options that were more in line with them. I then began working for Centerstone of Indiana, a Community Mental Health Center in Bloomington, as a Health Coach. During the height of the pandemic in 2020, my work went online and I transitioned roles. I became the Community Outreach Coordinator and masters-level clinician for a suicide prevention grant, then ended my clinical time to focus on community outreach for a subsequent and similar grant. It was during that time that I applied and was accepted to my current PhD program. I believe all of these experiences have given me unique skills in both teaching and research. In aviation, I learned to stay the course under pressure and prioritize safety. As a climbing coach and health coach, I learned to honor my athletes' goals and be their partner, navigating the many barriers life throws at us all. As a clinician in suicide prevention, I learned to hold space for others' pain and work with them to transform it into a life they found worth living. Finally, as a Community Outreach Coordinator, I learned the complexities of community-involved research and to translate information about mental health from researchers to clinicians to community members to clients and in all directions throughout that collection of people. In grant work, I saw gaps that no one seemed to be able to fill and questions there weren't yet answers to. All of this brought me to the world of knowledge "production," where the power of publication takes one's implicit knowing and makes it explicit, contributing a brick to our collective house of understanding. ​ So here I am now. Trying to inject all these things into my work, trying to hold them and share them with love and wisdom. Through storytelling, art, conversation, and experience, I am adding my voice to those who may struggle to be heard. I thrive in the unconventional and underestimated. I hope that will make our world a better place for everyone.