In this presentation for the Nutrition and Fitness Collaborative of the Central Coast (NFCC), I focused on shifting health conversations away from individuating attributions like willpower, motivation, and personal responsibility, and toward the role of urban design, environment, and systems in shaping health behavior. Presenting to partners working in CalFresh and Medi-Cal, I emphasized that most clients want to make healthier choices, but intentions alone rarely translate into action because health decisions are shaped by cognitive load, stress, habit, and environmental constraints.

I drew on social and environmental psychology to explain how automatic processes, decision fatigue, and identity-based norms often override rational planning, especially under conditions of socioeconomic strain. Rather than framing nutrition and physical activity as individual failures, I highlighted how choice architecture, access to green and public spaces, transportation, food environments, and neighborhood design strongly influence everyday health decisions.

I spent significant time discussing how urban stressors and fragmented service systems increase barriers to healthy behavior, particularly for communities navigating CalFresh and Medi-Cal systems. By examining inequitable access to resources, administrative burdens, and unwelcoming institutions, I argued that health outcomes are better understood as products of structural and environmental design rather than personal deficits.

I concluded by calling on community partners to focus on reducing barriers, making healthy choices the default, and redesigning environments to support habit formation and self-compassion. The goal was to reframe health promotion as a systems-level responsibility, where urban planning, service coordination, and policy design play a central role in enabling healthier lives.

You can click the image above to be taken to the full slide deck.

In this guest lecture for Dr. Mrinal Sinha’s class, I challenged deficit thinking, the tendency to explain educational failure by locating problems within students and families rather than in structural conditions. Drawing on my experiences in education and community work, I showed how deficit explanations repeatedly appear across contexts and function to shift responsibility away from institutions .

I traced the historical roots of these ideas to Social Darwinism, eugenics, and early intelligence testing, illustrating how pseudoscientific beliefs about race, intelligence, and heredity shaped schooling practices such as tracking and segregation. Although these ideas became less explicit over time, I argued that they persist today through frameworks like the culture of poverty and through research and policies that individualize failure while ignoring context .

I then connected this history to modern social psychology, focusing on attribution theory and how internal explanations for success and failure obscure structural inequality. By introducing concepts such as social capital, navigational capital, and cultural wealth, and by using examples from Monterey County, I reframed students and families as navigating unequal systems rather than lacking ability or motivation. I concluded by emphasizing praxis, calling for institutional accountability, consciousness-raising, and interventions that address structural barriers instead of reproducing blame .

You can click the image above to be taken to the full slide deck.

I had the opportunity to speak at TEDx Waves at California State University, Monterey Bay, where I presented on deficit thinking, a framework that critiques how students from historically marginalized communities are often viewed by educators through a lens of perceived deficiency. Rather than recognizing students' strengths, resilience, and contextual knowledge, this perspective tends to locate academic struggles within the individual, ignoring broader structural and relational factors.

The talk drew directly from my research with Dr. Mrinal Sinha, where we conducted a thematic analysis of 53 interviews with academically successful Latinx college students. Our study explored how these students experienced and responded to deficit-based assumptions in educational settings, particularly in their interactions with faculty and institutional agents. Their reflections revealed a consistent pattern of being underestimated, misjudged, or framed as at-risk despite demonstrated success. These findings shaped my argument for moving toward strengths-based, equity-informed educational practices that honor students' lived realities.

Presenting at TEDx allowed me to translate this research into a broader public dialogue. I spoke as both a researcher and a student, aiming to humanize and contextualize the consequences of deficit thinking. The talk represents an extension of my pedagogical and research philosophy, one that centers student voice, interrogates inherited narratives, and contributes to more inclusive and responsive systems of education.

To read more about the experience, please visit my Substack by clicking on the photo or watch the talk on YouTube!

As a guest speaker during CSUMB’s Undergraduate Research Week, I presented on how psychological research methods can be applied to nonprofit settings, focusing particularly on the integration of assessment, grant writing, and program development. The talk drew from my work with Outside the Box Education, the Ventana Wildlife Society, and the Furnace Teen Center, where I have worked as both a researcher and a grant writer.

I discussed how psychological training, particularly in measurement, evaluation, and human-centered design, has enabled me to support organizations in developing data-informed programs and securing funding. I shared insights into designing studies that meet both ethical and practical demands, translating assessment results into compelling funding narratives, and communicating findings in ways that are accessible to diverse audiences, from funders to program staff.

The talk emphasized the importance of adaptability and ethical responsibility when conducting research in resource-limited, community-based settings. I reflected on the challenges of conducting meaningful assessments in the absence of formal IRB structures, the role of reciprocity and consent in community engagement, and the value of iterative feedback in refining both research and programming.

This experience represents a key component of my broader research trajectory, where psychology is applied not just to generate knowledge, but to support the sustainability and equity of real-world systems. It underscores my commitment to translational research that bridges academic training with public service.

The slide deck can be accessed by clicking on the image.