Doctoral Candidate
Geospatial Information Sciences
The University of Texas at Dallas
M.A. Geography (2013)
University of British Columbia
University of Minnesota
My current research areas include social inequalities in health, spatial statistics, and epistemology.
At UBC, my research was focused on the political economy of labor and race. My paper in Florida Historical Quarterly examines the state's convict leasing program (1877-1919), under which the state prison population was leased to private industry as a bound labor force. The paper discusses its rapid expansion in tandem with the lumber industry, its connection to debt peonage, the role of physicians in managing and defending the system, and its eventual demise.
My dissertation, titled "Plausible reasoning and heuristic methodology in human geography: An invesitagtion of colorectal cancer incidence and inequalities in Texas, 1999--2019", engages with the methodological framework of plausible reasoning, particularly as developed by George Pólya. I view plausible reasoning as complementary to realist philosophies of science, and I am interested in its potential to bridge qualitative-quantitative divisions in the social and health sciences. The empirical side of the project is focused on colorectal cancer (CRC) incidence in Texas and is concerned with evaluating various explanations of social inequalities in the CRC burden within the context of the state's evolving geographies of class and race.