I am an Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at St. Mary's College of Maryland. As a social psychologist, I focus on two main themes within the topic of belongingness.
First, I examine the two-sided nature of social exclusion with a particular focus ghosting. My work considers how people reject, why they do so, how they are perceived, and what the consequences are for both parties.
My second line of research is in examining threats to belonging and creating interventions to combat them. My work applies social psychological theory to inform the creation of game and narrative-based interventions. Within this work, I focus on creating interventions to combat gender biases and interventions to improve retention of women in STEM as well as ways to improve outcomes following acts of social rejection.
In both of my lines of work, I use a range of interdisciplinary tools, from traditional social psychological methods (e.g., lab studies with actors, field studies, archival methods) to more modern methods (e.g., digital games, interactive narrative software).
I earned my Ph.D. in Social and Personality Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin and my B.A. in Psychology from Haverford College. I was a postdoctoral researcher at Tiltfactor, a Dartmouth College interdisciplinary lab that creates and studies games designed to foster social change.