I am an advanced candidate for a Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Sociology at Duke University in Durham, NC. I study the organizational dynamics of religious congregations, the interconnection between religion and inequality, the interplay between work and physical and emotional health, and the social dynamics of survey research. Along with historical and mixed-methods approaches, my research leverages advances in computational methods in the social sciences to more accurately model social processes.
As a quantitative sociologist, I am keenly interested in finding ways to leverage advanced statistical methods to more accurately model social processes. I am highly proficient in Bayesian statistical methods (including hierarchical models and growth curves), the structural equation modeling of longitudinal data, and spatial statistics. I am an advanced R programmer and developer. I have training in survey design, interviewing, and survey management.
My dissertation, entitled "The Social Fabrication of Protestant Megachurches" is being supervised by Mark Chaves (chair), Lisa Keister, Jen'nan Read, and Grant Wacker (Religion). It explores the causes and consequences of a major trend in the organization of American religion, namely, the concentration of people into very large churches.
I have published in Social Networks, the Journal of Social History, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Research in the Sociology of Work and the Journal of Social Thought and Research.
I spent one year as a visiting instructor in Sociology at King's University in Edmonton, Alberta, where I taught the sociology of deviance, the sociology of gender, the sociology of religion, and introductory sociology. I have taught quantitative methods at Duke. You can find links to syllabi and course evaluations here.
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