I am an Assistant Professor of Business, Government and Society at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. I am also a senior fellow at the Wharton ESG Initiative.
I study how individual career decisions and organizational policies intersect, with a particular emphasis on strategic human capital and ESG-related issues. I investigate questions such as how firms respond – substantively or symbolically – to investor demands for action on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues, gender differences in competitiveness and ambition, and how mentors change the career paths of their mentees. My work also sheds light on how women and racial minorities reach leadership roles, uncovering differences in how employees use internal or external mobility in pursuing promotions.
Across these lines of inquiry, I utilize online experiments, large scale career history data, and causal inference methods to pinpoint the mechanisms that create and sustain disparities in the labor market and which shape firms’ social and environmental impacts.
Before joining McCombs, I completed my PhD at the University of Maryland. Prior to academia, I planned and was the founding principal of a charter high school in Los Angeles.