About

I grew up in a small town in Iowa. For my undergraduate, I attended the University of Northern Iowa (UNI), initially pursuing a degree in Social Studies Education. But after I took an introductory Anthropology class, I was hooked and switched my major to Anthropology! UNI emphasized a four-field Anthropology education (cultural, biological, archaeology, and linguistic), and this diversity of thought influenced my approach to research.

I then entered the Integrative Anthropological Sciences PhD program at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), working with Steve Gaulin as my advisor. At UCSB I continued to develop a cross-discipline approach to anthropology, taking classes in biology, statistics, geography, sociology, and Hindi. I also became a graduate student associate with the highly interdisciplinary Broom Center for Demography. I finished my PhD in 2023.

I am currently a postdoc working in the Computational Mate Choice Lab at UCSB under the supervision of Dan Conroy-Beam.

My research interests include mate choice, marriage, parenting, and social influences on decision making. My research to date has focused on how parents and offspring navigate marriage decisions in cultures that traditionally practice arranged marriage, and what the costs and benefits of arranged and non-arranged marriages are in those contexts. I conduct ethnographic fieldwork and collect primary data in Nepal. My work has been funded by the National Science Foundation.