Research Page

Research Statement

My research combines urban sociology, education policy, and computational history, focusing on how institutions (schools, government, and cities) sort, label, and constrain the opportunities of those facing structural disadvantage. This interest now manifests in the methodological question underlying that: how do researchers build the tools and systems that make such inquiry possible in the first place?

My undergraduate thesis transformed my interests into an ambitious goal. Examining New York City's specialized high school admissions process, I argued that the ideology of deservedness rationalizes merit-based admissions by constructing the "gifted pupil" and the "juvenile delinquent" as social twins — two sides of the same coin, defined against each other. The gifted pupil cannot exist without the delinquent to define itself against, and both categories are produced by institutions, not discovered in children. In place of deservedness, I proposed preparedness as a counter-ideology: a reframing that locates educational outcomes in structural conditions rather than individual worth.

That thesis was the beginning. Since then, my work has taken a decisive turn toward computational and archival methods. My current collaboration with my mentor (to be presented at the American Sociological Association's 2026 annual meeting) involves the construction of a structured database from nearly 8,000 pages of digitized U.S. National Archives records, applying a seven-stage computational pipeline to model our encounter with the archive itself. This project is teaching me that research extends beyond locating and working with evidence; it encompasses the forms of the sources we study, which embody the systems that enable findings, and our interactions with them. I am drawn to that infrastructure work: the codebooks, the databases, the metadata schemas, the pipelines. Beyond logistical tasks, they are theoretical commitments about what counts as evidence and how knowledge gets made.

I am pursuing a Master of Data Analytics & Applied Social Research at CUNY Queens College to improve my computational fluency before entering a doctoral program in either Sociology or Information Science. I want to be the kind of sociologist who can weave the threads of the historical archive and a statistical model together, creating representations of information that are accessibile and inclusive.

Active & Ongoing Projects

★ Featured Project — Modeling the Archival Encounter Department of Sociology, CUNY Queens College, Co-authored with mentor 

Status: Ongoing — To be presented at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, 2026

This project builds on that insight by asking a different question: what can we learn by turning our attention to the folders, boxes, and filing systems that produced the archive in the first place? Treating the archive as an artifact of organizational self-representation, rather than a transparent window onto the past, we develop a strategy for examining primary sources at different distances that complements traditional close reading of historical sociology.

Our corpus includes 7,719 scanned pages from roughly 2,095 documents by the U.S. Public Health Service's Air Pollution Engineering Branch (1955-1962), housed at the U.S. National Archives in Maryland. These records (correspondence, reports, proposals, trip reports, and jottings) cover a key period in federal air pollution regulation, centered on the Air Pollution Control Act of 1955.

My role in this project covered stages three to six: database construction, spreadsheet design, qualitative coding, and review, which form the backbone of the analysis. This nearly two-year effort involved archival, analytical, and documentation work, providing me with hands-on training in computational methods like metadata schema design, longitudinal dataset development, and social network analysis of historical correspondence.

Methods: Computational pipeline development, metadata extraction, qualitative coding, social network analysis, data visualization, archival research, longitudinal dataset construction

Metadata Database for Historical Images Department of Sociology, CUNY Queens College — Advisor: mentor

Status: Ongoing — Data Collection & Database Development

This project is directly connected to the archival pipeline described above. It involves transforming the information of approximately 8,000 historical images into organized datasets to construct a structured metadata database using qualitative coding methods, designed to support social network analysis of the Public Health Service's internal correspondence networks. My role encompasses transformation, codebook development, data entry, variable extraction, and the design of over 20 spreadsheets for systematic categorization. This project has been my primary training ground for the computational and database management skills I am actively building toward doctoral work.

Completed

Institutional Evidence Curation for Middle States Re-Accreditation Office of Institutional Effectiveness, CUNY Queens College, December 2024 – March 2026 

Status: Completed — Self-Study Report submitted to the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE), February 2026

I joined this project during its final and most intensive phase: evidence consolidation, report production, and accreditation-visit preparation, which brought a process nearly three years in the making to completion.

Queens College's reaffirmation of institutional accreditation accelerated in Summer 2023 under the direction of an Executive Steering Committee and seven working groups (comprising over 80 faculty, staff, and community members) organized around MSCHE's Seven Standards for Accreditation. By the time I joined the Office of Institutional Effectiveness in December 2024, the working groups had submitted their draft chapters, the full Self-Study Report was in revision, and the college was preparing for both a campus-wide town hall and the peer evaluator visit.

My contribution initially focused on helping to organize and curate over 3,000 pieces of institutional evidence on SharePoint, which the documentation infrastructure supports the Self-Study's claims across all seven standards. This work required close attention to MSCHE's evidentiary requirements, consistency in how materials were labeled and categorized, and coordination across multiple offices to ensure that the evidence library was accurate, navigable, and complete. Another separate task involved the translation of complex alumni outcomes data and institutional research findings into 33 data-driven infographics using Adobe InDesign, designed to communicate key findings clearly to reviewers and internal stakeholders alike.

The Self-Study Report, covering mission, ethics, student learning, effectiveness, planning, governance, and more, was published and submitted to MSCHE in February 2026.

This project gave me firsthand exposure to how the people working for an institution work together to measure, narrate, and represent themselves under external scrutiny. That experience directly informs my broader research interest in how the categories institutions use to evaluate themselves shape what gets counted, what gets seen, and whose experiences get documented.

Methods: Evidence curation & documentation management, SharePoint organization, data visualization, infographic design (Adobe InDesign), institutional reporting

Who Gets to Be Gifted?: Rethinking Educational Gatekeeping in New York City Department of Sociology, CUNY Queens College

Status: Completed — Published, Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Journal (2024); Presented at MMUF Regional Conference (April 2024) and MMUF Summer Research Symposium, University of Chicago (August 2024)

This project examined how New York City's specialized high school admissions process produces the categories of "gifted" and "delinquent" as social twins — two extreme sides of the same coin, mutually defining and institutionally sustained. Drawing on functionalist and conflict perspectives in the sociology of education, I argued that giftedness is not an intrinsic ability to be discovered in children but a socially constructed identity maintained by American education systems through merit-based admissions mechanisms that encode racial and economic inequality under the guise of objectivity. The project originated as an independent research endeavor and grew into my undergraduate honors thesis.

Methods: Critical discourse analysis, secondary data analysis, sociological theory, qualitative coding

Wanting to Be Involved: Student Engagement & Belonging at an Urban Commuter College Department of Sociology, CUNY Queens College

Status: Completed — Presented, Borough of Queens CUNY Undergraduate Research Symposium (April 2024)

This campus-wide evaluation project examined how urban college students define engagement and whether campus involvement enhances their sense of educational belonging. I co-designed and deployed a survey instrument using Microsoft Forms, conducted a systematic random sample of approximately 1,800 students, and carried out three semi-structured qualitative interviews to develop and validate 25 survey questions.

Methods: Survey design, systematic random sampling, semi-structured interviewing, mixed methods\

Child Emigration & Material Culture in Horatio Alger, Jr.'s Young Adult Novels CUNY Research Scholars Program, CUNY Queensborough Community College 

Status: Completed — Published, Teaching Sociology (2019); Presented at two regional symposia (December 2019; July 2020)

This project applied sociological frameworks of migration and mobility to qualitative data collected from over 26 historical young adult novels, coding narrative data to trace the mechanisms of movement embedded in the texts. This was my first experience with academic publication and with the full research-to-dissemination cycle.

Methods: Qualitative coding, content analysis, sociological framework application

Honors Thesis

"Who Gets to Be Gifted in The City of Dreams?: Discourses of Deservedness and Preparedness on New York City's Specialized Public High Schools" CUNY Queens College, Department of Sociology Advisor: Dr. Amy Hsin Completed: May 2025 — Adapted version published: Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Journal, 2024

I grew up in New York City's public school system. When it came time to apply to high school, the nine specialized public high schools loomed large: institutions consistently ranked among the nation's best serve as gateways to futures for disadvantaged kids like me could only dream about. I was accepted. My dear friend, who had done more to prepare both of us than anyone else, was not. That experience stayed with me. My thesis was my attempt to understand it sociologically.

The central argument is this: the ideology of deservedness rationalizes the existence of New York City's specialized public high schools and their merit-based admissions by constructing two mutually defining academic identities — the gifted pupil and the juvenile delinquent. These are not neutral descriptions of student ability. They are socially produced categories, historically rooted in scientific racism and segregative practice, that encode structural inequalities as individual merit. Examining high school mission statements, news articles, and online comment sections through qualitative coding, I traced the contours in which deservedness operates across three domains: institutional self-representation, journalistic framing, and public discourse.

As a counter-ideology, I propose preparedness — a reframing that locates educational outcomes in the conditions that shape students' lives rather than in the students themselves. Preparedness does not ask who deserves access to high-quality education. It asks what structural conditions allow students to both demonstrate what they are already capable of and support their growth.

The thesis was developed through the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, presented at two MMUF conferences, and adapted for publication before my undergraduate graduation.

About the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship

The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship (MMUF) is one of the most competitive undergraduate research fellowships in the United States. Administered by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, MMUF has supported over 5,000 students from underrepresented backgrounds since 1988, providing research funding, faculty mentorship, participation in regional and national conferences, and intensive training at summer institutes hosted by leading research universities — all with the explicit goal of increasing faculty diversity in the humanities and social sciences.

I was selected as a Mellon Mays Fellow at CUNY Queens College in June 2023. My fellowship supported the research that became my honors thesis and my first sole-authored publication, and provided the opportunity to present my work at the MMUF Summer Research Training Program at the University of Chicago in August 2024. The fellowship also introduced me to a national network of scholars and mentors whose work continues to shape my thinking.

Methods & Approaches

My training spans the full arc from archival and textual methods to computational and quantitative analysis. I came to this combination openly because the questions I have in urban sociology and educational research require both the interpretive depth of qualitative inquiry and the analytical infrastructure of computational methods. I am actively working on the latter if I am accepted into doctoral training.