I am a political scientist of education with expertise in civic learning & participation.

I study the politics of education and the policymaking process to understand civic knowledge, learning, socialization, and engagement in a vibrantly diverse United States.

In particular, I examine variation in how political elites, academic researchers, and citizens (residents of a community and/or nation-state) conceptualize and operationalize civic knowledge(s) and how these differences relate to their daily encounters with the government.

I use community-engaged research approaches to inform qualitative and quantitative methodologies and seek to answer questions being asked by the public. I have extensive experience designing and implementing in-depth interviews, focus groups, and survey experiments, along with a variety of user experience research methods (card sorting, A/B testing, diary study).

At Penn, I have taught over a dozen courses at the Graduate School of Education, the School of Arts and Sciences, and Wharton as both an instructor of record and teaching assistant, for which I have been awarded the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching (2022) and the Penn Provost’s Prize for Excellence in Teaching (2019).

Prior to graduate school, I was a K-12 social studies teacher and an AmeriCorps Volunteer in Hartford, CT. I earned a MA, MPA, and M.S.Ed. from the University of Pennsylvania, a BA from Mount Holyoke College, a certificate in Social Studies Teaching (grades 7-12) with content distinction in the state of Connecticut, and a certificate in TESOL from the School for International Training in Costa Rica.