Role

As the Senior Associate Director of experiential learning and Service Focus Program Director, I work with a wonderful team to design and offer internships, fellowships, and other programming that supports students in deeply engaging with a societal issue and learning from community partners. I know that these experiences, coupled with careful reflection and contextualization, can help students develop a deeper understanding of their own values as well as the systems that shape our world. Through the Service Focus program, I work with faculty and partners both on-campus and in the community to provide special support for students in their sophomore year that are seeking to connect their internship experiences and service interests to their academic trajectory at Princeton. I am always energized by seeing how students learn how to produce and apply knowledge in new ways – and it is both my joy and honor to guide students in connecting this learning to their future endeavors at Princeton and beyond.

Background

I have a long-standing interest in how research and higher education interface with community needs, and how public conversation and policy are shaped. Before coming to the Pace Center, I conducted research and teaching in global public health, with a particular focus on understanding social and biological dimensions of vulnerability and resilience to disease. As an associate research scholar and lecturer with Princeton’s Global Health and Health Policy Program for five years, I enjoyed working with students from all majors as they explored the many factors that shape community wellbeing around the world. Prior to that, I was a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at Columbia University. I am a firm believer in the value of interdisciplinary thinking, and this is reflected in my academic path, which has taken me through a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology from Stanford University, a Master of Philosophy degree in international development studies from Oxford University, and a Bachelor of the Arts degree in biochemical sciences from Harvard University. 

Come Talk to Me About 

• Building pathways that knit together academic and service interests
• Experiential learning
• Internships
• Program and curricular design

What I’m Reading 

I always have far too many books in my “to-read” stack, but welcome recommendations for more (I’ve been told there’s a Japanese word, tsundoku, that refers to exactly this tendency).  When reading for leisure, I’m usually drawn towards fiction – I’m still thinking about Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, which was a wonderfully expansive and creative meditation on the stories we tell ourselves and each other, and how we live together on this beautiful and fragile world.  But I’m currently immersed in a nonfiction book, Dan Fagin’s Tom’s River: A Story of Science and Salvation, which traces investigations of a cancer cluster linked to industrial pollution in a Jersey Shore town not too far from here.  It is both tragic and hopeful, and weaves together many cross-cutting questions for those interested in how change happens in the world – what kinds of evidence and voices carry weight, and what kinds are dismissed?  How are movements and coalitions built and sustained?  

Favorite Community Spot

I love all the green spaces in the Princeton area – Marquand Park and the D&R Canal are both fairly walkable from campus and beautiful in all seasons.