My Story
I am a Visiting Scholar at the Sloan School of Management at MIT. I completed a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2021 and a postdoc at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. There, I published micro work in OBHDP on the communications tactics that help both white and ethnic minority managers promote diversity programs while reducing backlash – resolving a controversy on whether or not white managers are best positioned to promote de-segregation of the managerial rank at firms.
Beforehand, I spent years inside the federal government’s bureaucracy as a United States diplomat, and am now an institutional scholar studying where bureaucracies come from: organizational design decisions. My dissertation is on the topic of innovation in diversity practices: why some firms adopt turnkey diversity programs while others engage in experimentation and tailoring to fit their unique needs. In comparative case studies of entrepreneurial tech firms in Silicon Valley that had similar HR structures, similar CEO political leanings, and similar “inclusion-before-diversity” diversity strategies, my work found what behaviors led to the innovative approach versus the copy-and-paste approach. Before academia, I was a U.S. diplomat posted to Cyprus, Hong Kong & Macau, an emergency task force after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and the Secretary of State’s headquarters team. I hold a BA from Stanford with a minor in economics and honors in international security studies and a master’s degree in the same field from Princeton.