Areas of Expertise
My research focuses on American public policy and politics, social policy, health policy, and how the variation in implementation across state and local jurisdictions creates disparities in access to public programs. I have extensive training in econometrics, research design, and program evaluation.
As a Program Evaluator at OPM, I have worked to aid the agency’s implementation of its Strategic Plan, Learning Agenda, Annual Evaluation Plans, and Capacity Assessment. With primary responsibilities as a researcher, I have conducted and supported multiple studies to support evidence-building on topics central to strengthening and promoting the Federal workforce.
Methodologically, I use advanced quantitative approaches for causal inference, quantitative text analysis, and spatial analysis.
Please explore my dissertation research and other published work in the sections below.
My dissertation, “Health, Wealth, and Representation: Three Essays on LGBTQ+ Politics and Policy,” used an interdisciplinary approach to studying politics and policies in the United States affecting the queer community.
I leveraged theories and frameworks from political science, economics, applied geography, and public health to inform my research and generate novel research questions of importance to the study of queer politics and policy.
My three-essay dissertation also used a variety of methodological approaches, including spatial analysis, methods for causal inference, and latent variable analysis, exemplifying my ability as an interdisciplinary scholar to produce cutting-edge scholarship that transcends disciplinary lines.
The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law and the Graduate School at UNC-Chapel Hill funded portions of my dissertation research. I also received the 2022 Kenneth Sherril Prize from the American Political Science Association for the best doctoral dissertation proposal for an empirical study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender topics in political science.
HIV/AIDS policy in the U.S. can be traced through the social constructions of those afflicted by the AIDS epidemic. When gay and bisexual men and illicit drug users were disproportionately afflicted by HIV/AIDS, the federal government was notoriously slow to respond. As the social context of HIV/AIDS shifted over time, however, so did the distribution of programs and policies. In 2019, the Trump Administration launched the federal program, Ending the HIV Epidemic (EHE), which has been subsequently expanded by the Biden Administration. Today, EHE cites equity as a key pillar of the operations of the program and places a large focus on the accessibility of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a preventative medicine intended to decrease the likelihood of HIV infection.
When taken as prescribed, PrEP reduces the risk of getting HIV through sexual intercourse by roughly 99 percent and through sharing needles by approximately 74 percent. Despite its efficacy, uptake of PrEP has been low, citing issues like stigma and constrained access to a prescribing physician.
Given the stated goals of EHE to mitigate geographic and racial disparities in HIV/AIDS in part through increasing access to PrEP, in this dissertation chapter, I answer the question: How equitably distributed are PrEP providers in the United States?
I leverage data from the Centers for Disease Control National Prevention Information Network’s PrEP Locator Database and the American Communities Survey. I use an innovative methodological approach, the Integrated Two-Step Floating Catchment Area Method, to ascertain how areas of constrained access to PrEP, what I call ‘PrEP deserts’, evolve over time. This essay highlights that despite many states expanding PrEP access for their populations, I find that certain demographic groups like Black and American Indian/Alaskan Native individuals failed to realize the same level of gains in access as other populations.
The declared “war on poverty” in the United States spurred multiple new initiatives to reduce poverty in the United States. Among the multifaceted social safety net in the United States, scholars and policymakers alike regard the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) as the most effective antipoverty policy by dispensing modest benefits to qualifying, employed individuals.
Expanded federally and supplemented by many states, EITCs do not just lift people out of poverty: adoption of the federal EITC increased labor force participation and reduced the rate of low-birth-weight, especially among Black mothers, and state EITCs improved the mental and physical health of recipients.
Yet, given that LGBTQ+ individuals experience poverty at higher rates than their straight, cis-gendered counterparts, no such evaluation considers the implications of EITCs for LGBTQ+ recipients. Moreover, given that queer individuals face unique determinants of poverty through employment discrimination and possess varied household structures, the EITC may differentially affect queer populations. This dissertation chapter seeks to answer the question: What effect do state EITCs have on the health of LGBTQ+ individuals?
I pair data on state EITC adoptions and rates of generosity with survey data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) survey. Using a difference-in-difference-in-differences (DDD) approach, I find that, in the aggregate, EITCs do not differentially affect the health of sexual minority recipients. However, when considering the intersections of race, gender, and sexual minority status, I find modest differential effects for certain subgroups within the LGBTQ+ community, particularly along dimensions of self-reported mental health measures.
In 1977, Harvey Milk made quite a splash when elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors as California’s first openly gay elected official. Many look to Milk’s election as the start of a ripple effect where openly LGBTQ+ candidates sought political office more frequently and increasingly achieved electoral success. Over time, the splash made by Milk culminated in recent years, leading to a ‘Rainbow Wave’ extending into recent years, where record numbers of openly LGBTQ+ candidates appear on ballots across the nation.
Over the past two decades, previous scholarship sought to identify district-level characteristics correlated with the electoral success of candidates from underrepresented groups in legislative assemblies, such as women and racial/ethnic minorities. However, few studies focus on the factors leading to increased LGBTQ+ descriptive representation. This chapter aims to answer the question: What are the characteristics of state legislative districts that elect LGBTQ+ candidates?
I parallel previous descriptive representation literature by constructing a novel measure of queer-friendliness of state legislative districts. I use an original dataset of openly-queer politicians elected to state legislative office from 2012 to 2020. Combining theory-driven demographic variables from the American Communities Survey and institutional features of each state’s legislative chambers, I use Latent Profile Analysis to measure the queer-friendliness of each district.
After generating latent profiles for all state legislative districts between 2012 and 2020, I find that districts with lower proportions of racial and ethnic minorities, a high share of the district population with a college education, a high median income, lower levels of professionalism in state legislatures, lean more liberal, and have low religious adherence elect openly-LGBTQ+ individuals at higher rates. Using the latent profiles, I also identify additional state legislative districts that are more likely to elect an openly-LGBTQ+ state legislator should they run but have not done so between 2012 and 2020.
with Candis Watts Smith, Rebecca J. Kreitzer, and Tracee M. Saunders in Politics & Gender. 2022.
Historically, access to contraception has been supported in a bipartisan way, best exemplified by consistent Congressional funding of Title X--the only federal program specifically focused on providing affordable reproductive healthcare to American residents. However, in an era of partisan polarization, Title X has become a political and symbolic pawn, in part due to its connection to family planning organizations like Planned Parenthood. The conflicts around Title X highlight the effects of the intertwining of abortion politics with that of contraception policy, particularly as they relate to reproductive justice and gendered policymaking. Family planning organizations like Planned Parenthood have responded to these battles by bowing out of the Title X network. To what extent are contraception deserts--places characterized by inequitable access to Title X--developed or expanded? What is the demographic make-up of these spaces of inequality? We leverage data from the OPA and the U.S. Census and use the integrated two-step floating catchment area method to illustrate the effects of a major change in the Title X network in 10 states. Our results reveal the widespread human ramifications of increasing constraints on family planning organizations due to quiet but insidious federal bureaucratic rule changes.
with Rebecca J. Kreitzer, Candis Watts Smith, and Tracee M. Saunders in Journal of Health Politics, Policy & Law. 2020.
Context: This article focuses on whether, and the extent to which, the resources made available by Title X—the only federal policy aimed specifically at reproductive health care—are equitably accessible. Here, equitable means that barriers to accessing services are lowest for those people who need them most.
Methods: The authors use geographic information systems (GIS) and statistical/spatial analysis (specifically the integrated two-step floating catchment area [I2SFCA] method) to study the spatial and nonspatial accessibility of Title X clinics in 2018.
Findings: The authors find that contraception deserts vary across the states, with between 17% and 53% of the state population living in a desert. Furthermore, they find that low-income people and people of color are more likely to live in certain types of contraception deserts.
Conclusions: The analyses reveal not only a wide range of sizes and shapes of contraception deserts across the US states but also a range of severity of inequity.
with Rebecca J. Kreitzer and Christopher Z. Mooney in The Forum. 2019.
Scholars of morality policy have built an extensive literature surrounding these issues, which often are associated with unusual political behavior. Early studies aimed at explaining this behavior but avoided defining a “morality policy” explicitly, typically by focusing on issues that appeared obviously to pertain to morality, like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. Drawing on the existing morality policy scholarship and classic theories of public policy, we argue that no public policy is inherently moral. Rather, policies may be “moralized” or “demoralized” over time, not due to any intrinsic characteristic, but because the prominent policy frames in their debate have changed. Public opinion and its proxies, along with certain exogenous shocks, may be important in determining when a morality frame will be more prevalent. Because the distinctiveness of morality policy lies in the discourse surrounding it, scholars should examine the behavior and attitudes of relevant advocates in these debates, rather than relying on aggregate data and making assumptions about intrinsic policy characteristics.
with Rebecca J. Kreitzer and Emily U. Schilling in Interest Group Politics, 10th ed. 2019.