Mentorship | Disseminating Science | Equity and Inclusion
Rethinking Inequality:
Leveraging Psychological Science to Advance Economic Justice
In the United States and around the world, economic inequality is among the defining issues of our time. In 2025, 1 percent of U.S. households controlled nearly one-third of all wealth while half of the country struggled for less than 3 percent. Such disparity is socially corrosive and unlikely to be democratically or economically sustainable.
Rethinking Inequality: Using Psychological Science to Advance Economic Justice brings together psychologists from academia, health care, and government to examine the effects of inequality and offer real-world policy solutions. Across seven policy papers, psychological science is applied to understand the many manifestations of poverty and economic inequality—from the precarity of low-wage work, to housing insecurity and the threat of homelessness, to the power dynamics that pervade the legal system.
My collaborators and I contributed a brief on meeting the developmental needs of young children experiencing housing instability.
UMN Homework Starts with Home Research Partnership
The Homework Starts with Home Research Partnership is a grand challenges project with collaborators at the University of Minnesota and several state agencies. As apart of this team I helped evaluate the down stream effects of a housing monetary assistance program on children and families as well as population level analyses integrating administrative data cross several sources. See a flash talk from some of my work to the left.
Check out my policy brief.
Here is a training module I developed.
Here is an invited UNICEF Presentation
Young Social Scientists
The Young Social Scientist Program – founded by Professor Melissa Koenig and Dr. Annelise Pesch – pairs graduate students with middle and high school students to create their own developmental psychology research project. I have been involved with this program since its initial creation in Fall 2019 and I helped transfer the program’s curriculum into an online format. I also serve as a high school student’s project mentor. The young scientists presented their projects during a symposium during Child Developments Biennial Meeting in April 2021. See my mentee’s project below!
Growing Brains
Growing Brains, founded by Keira Leneman and Shreya Lakhan-Pal, is a developmental psychology neuroscience outreach program that aims to educate young people about their brains development and cognition. Check out a video of Shreya and I giving a virtual presentation for the Bell Museum’s Brain2Brain week!
NextGen Psychology Scholars
The NextGen Psychology Scholars Program, founded by Meriah DeJoseph and Kate Carosella, is a graduate student-led mentoring program for underrepresented undergraduate or post-baccalaureate students interested in pursuing PhD’s in psychology. With this program, I mentor two students on the in’s and out’s of preparing for graduate education.
Ronald E. McNair Program
The Ronald E. McNair Program is a federally funded TRIO program designed to prepare undergraduate students for graduate education. McNair Scholars are first generation students with financial need or students underrepresented in graduate education. As a previous McNair Scholar at the Pennsylvania State University, it has been a pleasure to serve as a graduate student mentor and panel volunteer for the McNair Scholar’s Program at the University of Minnesota!
Other Efforts
- Member, Utah Early Childhood Mental Health Working Group, Salt Lake City, UT.
- Committee Member, Maternal Mental Health Services Support for Unhoused or at Risk Communities, Utah Department of Health and Human Services, Salt Lake City, UT.
- Program Development and Training Member, Utah Association for Infant Mental Health, Salt Lake City, UT
- Advocacy, Community, and Engagement Committee Member, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT
- Invited Panel Member, Navigating the Academic Job Market, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
- Invited Panel Member, Navigating Post doctorate Training Fellowship Applications, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA
- Mentor, The Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology Division 53 Mentorship Program, American Psychological Association
- Facilitator, SEEDS Professional Development, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA. https://dpbh.ucla.edu/seeds/
- Educational Material Creation: Minneapolis Crisis Nursery
- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee Member – Curriculum Development, Clinical Science and Psychopathology Research Program, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
- Early Childhood Education Volunteer Family Homeless Shelter
- Developmental Psychopathology Curriculum Development Committee
- Wilder Foundation Minnesota Homeless Study Data Collector.
- Prospective Students Committee
- Diversity Scholar’s Program Volunteer
- Mom-Enough Panelist and Event Volunteer
- Big Brothers and Big Sisters Volunteer
