I am a developmental-community psychologist and assistant professor of psychology at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital / Harvard Medical School. I earned my BA in from Northwestern University in 2016 and my MA and PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018 and 2022, respectively. 

Informed by work across the fields of Education, Sociology, Public Health, and Ethnic Studies, my research adopts a multidisciplinary, multi-method, and anti-oppressive approach to the study of youth mental health, coping, and socioemotional well-being across adolescence and the transition to adulthood. Relying on my expertise in peer relations research, history in student affairs and organizing, and lived experiences as a second-generation South Asian American, I am interested in examining and promoting relational and institutional contexts that support young people's positive development. As such, my research, teaching, and mentorship are infused with an ethic of justice and care for youth across the various stages, spaces, and places of their development. I am deeply committed to working /with/ young people, in support of their resilience, resistance, and mere existence. 

Born in the Northeast US and raised in the Midwest, I am the eldest daughter of first-generation immigrants who moved from India to the U.S. in the post-1965 era. 

As a class- and caste-privileged South Asian American, I attended school in the western suburbs of Chicago. These privileges and opportunities have facilitated my ability to pursue my undergraduate and graduate education, and now my post-doctoral training at highly-rejective (or highly-selective) institutions. 

At the same time, my hometown growing up was particularly non-diverse and I both witnessed in others, and experienced first-hand, the isolation, alienation, and targeted harassment of students who didn't fit into the societal racial, religious, middle-class, non-disabled norm. This environment posed a lot of challenges to my identity development, self-understanding, and grasp of my place in society.