About
I am a social scientist studying the nature and consequences of engagement, punishment, and inequality. I have developed a robust, theory-driven research agenda for understanding how these social forces influence inequality in schools, the criminal justice system, and public health systems. My work appears in Nature Human Behaviour, PNAS, Science Advances, Social Forces, Sociology of Education, American Educational Research Journal, Educational Researcher, and more.
Much of my current research examines collaborative, non-police models of emergency mental-health response—how they affect crime, involuntary psychiatric detentions, and public safety—alongside continuing work on culturally responsive education and the ways schools evaluate, engage, and discipline students.
I earned my Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Department of Sociology in 2019. While there I was an IES Predoctoral Fellow and a Graduate Research Fellow at the Institute for Research on Poverty. For three years I was the research assistant for the Madison Education Partnership (MEP). I am currently a Senior Research Associate at the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and their Communities at Stanford University, and I serve on the editorial board of Educational Researcher.
Work at both universities has broadened my research agenda on engagement and punishment. The ways children and their families engage in schools and other social institutions do not simply prepare children for participating in and connecting to society; they are factors by which adults and peers evaluate whether children belong in the first place. How children are evaluated by adults and their peers helps determine their life trajectories—and thus contributes to social inequality. My work addressing these social phenomena mainly investigates how social interventions and policies shape engagement and punishment from childhood to adulthood.
Prior to entering UW–Madison, I was an assistant director at the Center for Educational Partnerships at Grand Valley State University (GVSU), a school counselor, a youth counselor for adjudicated adolescents, and a substitute teacher in urban, suburban, and rural school districts.
I am a co-founder of Pyne Research Associates, LLC, and I have also worked as a research consultant for survey research at MEP and for randomized controlled trials at the College Transition Collaborative, at Measured Decisions, Inc., and more.
While a graduate student at UW–Madison, I served as the first Chair of the Sociology Graduate Student Association.