About · /about
A little
about me.
Counseling and research, and the long way around to both. This page holds the medium-length version: the short one sits on the home page, and the CV lives behind a quiet lock.
“The gaps, the overlooked questions, the underserved people: less like an abstract research interest, more like an orienting instinct.
Matrescence is where the halves meet.
My psychology degree from American University arrives in August; the path there ran anything but straight. A diagnosis close to home sent me looking for clear, accessible information about BRCA gene mutations and genetic testing, and I found almost none of it in a form that made sense to someone navigating it for the first time. That gap had followed me long before I had language for it, visible in the experiences of people I love. Coursework in health promotion and research gave me the tools to do something about it: the BRCA resource now in build, a guide for people trying to figure out whether and how to get tested, particularly for adoptees and non-birth children for whom the standard pathway simply does not apply.
The coursework looks scattered on paper: an empathy study asking whether people feel animal pain the way they feel human pain, a group experiment on background music and attention, a literature review on stereotype threat and self-concept in adolescence. Two of those papers split one question between them. The animal pain study asks whose distress gets taken seriously; the adolescence review asks what happens to a self mid-transition. Matrescence is where the halves meet.
The lifespan contains two great identity reorganizations. Adolescence has an entire field: dedicated coursework, a century of theory. Matrescence, the psychological and identity transition into motherhood, has a word most clinicians have never heard, and a population navigating the reorganization largely unmet. I intend to spend a career on that asymmetry: counseling the people inside the transition, and research that treats matrescence as identity disruption followed by re-integration.
My path has taken me through unfamiliar territory more than once: places where the information ran thin, the resources never arrived, or the options never had someone like me in mind. It shapes how I think about care, communication, and what research is actually for, and it explains why the gaps, the overlooked questions, the underserved people, feel less like an abstract research interest and more like an orienting instinct.
Elsewhere · /about
Out in the open.
Public-facing places where the work shows up. Anything not listed here lives behind the lock on the relevant project page.