Currently, I am an Assistant in Research Faculty at the Learning Systems Institute at Florida State University. My roles include serving as the project manager for a large-scale evaluation project, the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, and as the CPALMS Model-Eliciting Activities Coordinator. I also serve as a consultant on selected external projects.

Prior to that, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for P-12 Engineering Research & Learning (INSPIRE) in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. There, I conducted research on engineering as a “caring” discipline in the context of broader social and environmental concerns. That research involved creating awareness of engineering as a discipline that has broad and meaningful impacts on society and the environment, studying the effects of students’ perceptions on engineers and engineering, and developing programmatic components to broaden K-16 students’ understanding of engineering.

My Ph.D. is in educational psychology with a specialization in assessment, research methodology, and measurement with a related area in statistics. I also have a graduate certificate in survey research. My background in methodology has allowed me to conduct interdisciplinary research in a variety of areas.

Some of my work includes: using geographical information systems (GIS) to explore the relationship between students’ environmental awareness and location, using a systems approach to model complex programs in program evaluation, and applying nonparametric and unfolding item response theory (IRT) models to examine model-data fit with ordinal-level data from students with disabilities.