I began studying household air pollution and the potential for cleaner cooking to improve well-being around the world while an undergraduate at Yale University where I worked as a research assistant for three years with Dr. Rob Bailis. In Honduras, I surveyed households to better understand household energy use patterns, especially with respect to their use of firewood for cooking. My initial focus was on firewood collection patterns --where people got firewood from, how frequently they got firewood, and how much they got -- to understand if household firewood use was a driver of deforestation in the area. Later, I aided in exploratory research in rural India in preparation for a large-scale randomized controlled trial.  

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After college, I worked for the Berkeley Air Monitoring Group assessing the sustained use of improved cookstoves in Peru and in Honduras measuring the impacts of improved biomass-burning stove on household air pollution in collaboration with local and international non-governmental organizations.

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While at Columbia University working towards my PhD in Environmental Health Sciences, I worked on a range of projects, including assessments of the association between asthma symptoms and emergency department visits and hospitalizations among adolescents in New York City, the impacts of NYC's Clean Heat Plan on indoor and outdoor air quality in apartments in northern Manhattan, the determinants of clean cooking fuel adoption and use in rural India, the impacts of clean cookstove interventions on air pollution exposure, birth outcomes, and early child health outcomes in a large randomized controlled trial in rural Ghana, and analysis of cooking fuel use and air pollution exposure patterns in Ecuador after decades of subsidized cooking gas.

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At Stanford, as a part of the Environmental Change and Human Outcomes Lab, I am working on understanding the health and climate benefits of clean-to-cleaner fuel transitions (e.g., from gas to renewable-based electricity) using Ecuador's ongoing promotion of induction stoves to replace gas cooking and also studying the health impacts of wildfire smoke pollution and coincident elevated temperatures in the US.