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 research fellow at the Wharton Impact, Value, and Sustainable Business Initiative.
I study how individual career decisions, organizational policies, and societal pressures intersect, with a particular emphasis on strategic human capital. I investigate how firms respond – substantively or symbolically – to investor demands for action on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. My work also sheds light on how women and racial minorities use distinct pathways to reach leadership roles and how diversity in the C-suite and boards of directors evolves in response to stakeholder pressures.
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.
