About
Technology product manager, workforce-training director, sociologist, management professor. Every stop has been about the same question: when technology changes how work gets done, who gets good work, and why?
I received my BA in Sociology from the University of Washington in 1997 and my MBA from the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine in 2000. I then spent several years in technology product management, in roles including Product Development Manager and Product Manager, building and shipping products and learning first-hand how technical decisions become organizational ones.
In 2005 I became Director of the Pacific Northwest OSHA Education Center at the University of Washington, and shortly afterward a program grantee of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences' Worker Training Program. For the next seven years I implemented targeted programs for precarious workers, including tribal, minority, undocumented, and formerly incarcerated populations. That work pushed me to think hard about the social, cultural, and political factors that shape workers' lives. Who has access to "good" jobs? How does a worker's background affect their opportunities?
Questions like these led me back to school. In 2012 I began a PhD in Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, completing it in 2018. That same year I joined the Department of Management and Business at Skidmore College, where I am now Associate Professor and faculty coordinator of MB 107, the department's introductory course.
My research sits at the interface of management, sociology, and information science, and it is about what AI and digital platforms do to work. I study the career trajectories of people whose work is matched, priced, and evaluated by algorithms; the dimensions of flexibility those systems promise and the ones they take away; the organizations entrepreneurs build inside platform infrastructure; and, with NSF support, how AI tools can be designed to serve workers rather than only the firms that deploy them. Most of my work is qualitative and longitudinal — I would rather follow the same seventy people for seven years than survey seven thousand once — and it is published across management, sociology, and human-computer interaction venues, including Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Communications of the ACM, Work, Employment and Society, and New Technology, Work and Employment.