She is a faculty member in UNC Charlotte’s Gerald G. Fox Master of Public Administration Program and in UNC Charlotte’s doctoral program in Public Policy. She earned her Ph.D. in Government & Social Policy from Harvard University in 2012 and her B.A. (Political Science; Economics) from the University of California, Irvine in 2005. Her research focuses on American politics with emphases on social policy, health policy, and immigration. In particular, she studies fluctuations in the American welfare state; citizen interactions with regulatory and safety-net policies; households’ navigation of public and private insurance products; and the politics of policy implementation, resilience, and retrenchment.