Interdisciplinary and international education

Between 2019 and 2022 I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Developing Identities in Cultural Environments lab at Northwestern University, working with Professor Onnie Rogers. From 2020 to 2022 I was a National Science Foundation Fellow, leading a project titled Politics, Activism, and Identity, which included four waves of mixed-methods data collection surrounding the 2020 U.S. presidential election. This ongoing project focuses on contextually anchored critical consciousness and racial identity development among diverse young adults.

In 2019 I earned a Dr. Phil. in Psychology from the University of Potsdam, Germany, where I worked in the Diversity in Education and Development lab with Professor Linda Juang. My mixed-methods doctoral research focused on links between racism, Islamophobia, and constructions of national identity in contemporary Germany, examined at the individual and societal levels.

In April 2018 I was awarded a KoUP cooperation research grant to work in the Narrative-Identity-Culture-Education lab at the University of Minnesota with my second doctoral mentor, Professor Moin Syed. Working with Dr. Syed expanded my expertise in qualitative methods and person-in-context examinations of identity development.

In addition to conducting my own research and working with secondary data from my mentors, I collaborated on the adaptation and implementation of Professor Adriana Umaña-Taylor’s Identity Project intervention to the German context. I co-led this multi-month, in-school intervention in a 7th-grade class and continue to be involved in the empirical assessment of its impact and publication of peer-reviewed journal articles based on this project.

Prior to starting my PhD I earned a Master of Arts in German Turkish Social Sciences, spending one year in Ankara, Turkey, at the Middle East Technical University before completing this interdisciplinary degree at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. I earned a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where I gained initial research experience working with Professor Jennifer Henderlong Corpus in what is now called the Academic Motivation Lab.

I am originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico and am a proud graduate of Albuquerque High School.