Brief Biographical Notes

Early Life

I was born in New York City, spent the better part of the first 17 years of my life in a (then) small coastal city called La Romana (i.e. “The Roman” with feminine inflection) on the Southeast corner of Dominican Republic, and have lived in the U.S. ever since.

Academic Training

I earned a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Brooklyn College in 1997. Starting in the year 2000, I enrolled in the graduate program in the Department of Sociology at the University of Arizona, where I was fortunate to earn a Ph.D. in 2006 under the supervision and mentorship of Ron Breiger and Al Bergesen.

Early Academic Career

Starting in 2006, I had the privilege to spend the first twelve years of my academic career in the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. I was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2012, and to Full Professor in 2016. While at Notre Dame, I was selected as co-editor, with Rory McVeigh and Sarah Mustillo, of the American Sociological Review, the flagship journal of the American Sociological Association (ASA), for a five-year term starting in 2015. In 2014, received the Lewis Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting from the ASA’s Section on Theory.

Recent Academic Career

In 2018, I decided to make the transition to the West (best) coast and moved to California, where I am currently a ladder faculty member and LeRoy Neiman Term Chair Professor in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. While at UCLA, I was elected a member of the Sociological Research Association in 2019. In 2020, I was appointed to the Board of Review Editors for the journal Science.