Graduate Program: Sociology, Ph.D. 

Year: Fourth

Hometown: Lehigh Valley, PA

I began researching health care practitioners’ participation and experiences in the weight inclusive health care movement for my master’s thesis at Lehigh University.  At that time, I analyzed
transcripts of a popular weight-inclusive podcast named Food Psych. 

I am currently building on my master’s work through my dissertation research by interviewing weight-inclusive health care practitioners about their participation and experiences in the movement directly.

With my research, I aim to raise awareness of the weight-inclusive health care movement, as well as the efforts and experiences of the individual health care practitioners who make up this movement.

While health scholars stress that top-down policy changes are needed to mitigate the injustice of medical weight bias and its adverse health consequences at the population level, too little attention has been paid to the bottom-up change efforts being carried out by health care practitioners themselves.

I received the 2024 Faculty Council for Gender Equity Student Research award for my dissertation work and recently published an article about the barriers that health care practitioners face as they transition toward and carry out weight inclusive care in the journal Fat Studies.

This summer, I presented my research at the International Weight Stigma Conference and the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problem.

My career goal is to work in an institution of higher education as a sociologist.