Research
I study how institutions organize unequal pathways through work and family over the life course. My research combines social stratification, demography, and computational methods to examine how the timing, sequencing, and configuration of life experiences shape long-term inequality.
Trajectory Stratification
My central research program develops the framework of trajectory stratification: the idea that institutionally structured life trajectories are themselves mechanisms of inequality. Rather than examining employment, marriage, parenthood, or social-policy participation as isolated events, I study how these experiences unfold together over time.
This framework connects three processes. Institutions channel people into differentiated trajectories, reward those trajectories unequally, and structure unequal access to the most advantageous pathways. My research develops computational and causal tools for measuring these processes and identifying their consequences for gender, racial, and economic inequality.
Dissertation Projects
Trajectory Stratification
Trajectory Stratification through Market, Family, and State
This project examines women’s economic mobility following divorce. I integrate multichannel sequence analysis with machine-learning g-computation to estimate the consequences of long-term trajectories across employment, remarriage, and welfare receipt.
The findings show that post-divorce trajectories form a clear hierarchy of economic protection and that access to protective pathways is racially stratified. The study demonstrates that the timing and configuration of life-course experiences can matter beyond their cumulative duration.
Sole-authored manuscript in preparation
Trajectory Atypicality
The Relational Dimension of Employment Instability
This project introduces trajectory atypicality, a relational measure of employment instability based on distance from cohort-typical employment pathways. I use large language models and representation learning to embed complete employment histories in a continuous trajectory space.
The analysis shows that the economic consequences of atypical employment pathways differ by gender and across cohorts. It reframes instability not only as the accumulation of adverse events, but also as deviation from socially organized and institutionally rewarded pathways.
Sole-authored manuscript under review
Trajectory Wage Gap
The Gender Wage Gap as a Trajectory Wage Gap
This project examines how joint work–family pathways contribute to gender inequality in wages. Using trajectory embeddings and decomposition methods, I estimate how differences in the distribution and economic returns of work–family trajectories contribute to the gender wage gap.
The project develops the concept of the trajectory wage gap and shows how gender inequality is generated through entire patterns of work and family experience rather than through isolated employment or family characteristics.
Sole-authored manuscript in preparation
Computational and Causal Methods
A second strand of my research develops methods for analyzing complex longitudinal and high-dimensional social processes. I work at the intersection of causal inference, machine learning, sequence analysis, and representation learning.
My methodological work includes integrating sequence analysis with g-computation, using machine learning to model treatment–covariate feedback over long time horizons, and applying language-model embeddings to represent employment and work–family histories. The goal is not simply to improve prediction, but to create tools that clarify sociological concepts and support credible causal and descriptive inference.