Research

I am a cultural/medical anthropologist whose research focuses on relationships among health, physical and social environments, and what makes life meaningful, especially among older populations. The big human question guiding my work is: How do older people and their families pursue healthy, meaningful lives amidst difficult circumstances (e.g., care transitions, geo-spatial access barriers, unjust social and economic policies, etc.)? My work to date has employed theories and methods from anthropology, gerontology, and health systems research to grapple with this core question in several ways:

Long-Term Services and Supports among Rural Veterans

Over half of rural Veterans are over age 65, and most will need Long-Term Services and Supports (LTSS) as they age. My current research at the VA Portland Health Care System focuses on adapting, testing, and implementing LTSS interventions to help rural Veterans age in environments that match their preferences and needs. My Rural Health Career Development Award, funded by the VA Office of Rural Health, examines the implementation of age-friendly care in rural VA nursing homes. This mixed-methods study will inform the national expansion of age-friendly care in these facilities, ensuring rural Veterans have equitable access to high-quality nursing home care that sets the stage for successful discharge to the community.

Aging and Migration among Puerto Rican Adults

My past work investigated how growing up and growing older in migratory contexts influences subjective aging experiences, as well as how age intersects with race, class, and gender to shape migrant experiences of social inclusion and exclusion. My dissertation, In Search of Tranquility: Migration and Older Puerto Rican Adults’ Quests for a Good Old Age, employed ethnographic methods to understand how older Puerto Rican adults imagine and pursue a subjective good old age amidst im/mobility regimes—the political economic processes by which people are bounded, emplaced, forced, and permitted to move and to migrate. I traced older adults’ quests across space and time to show how political economic processes rooted in US colonialism simultaneously condition migration as a strategy for the pursuit of a good old age and contribute to inequitable circumstances that make a good old age hard to find. My findings advanced understanding of how individuals develop notions of a good old age and how they respond when their ability to achieve a good old age is constrained by inequitable political, economic, and socio-cultural forces. In addition, my findings showed how governments differentially and indirectly regulate the internal migration of their own citizens (as opposed to only regulating the international migration of non-citizens) to advance understanding of how im/mobility regimes operate at multiple scales.

Neighborhood Contexts of Child Well-Being and Maltreatment

As a graduate student, I worked on an NIH-funded, mixed-methods study of neighborhood contexts of child maltreatment in Cleveland, Ohio (PI: James Spilsbury, Ph.D.). My work contributed to understanding how neighborhood structural factors and social processes influence child development and well-being. This included leading manuscripts delineating the role of non-kin older neighbors in advancing social capital for children and exploring how families endeavor to protect children while living in neighborhoods with elevated violent crime rates.