I am a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management (2023-2026). I received my Ph.D. in Management and M.A. in Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences from Columbia University. Before that, I obtained an A.B. in Sociology at Princeton University.

I identify not only as a management scholar, but also as an economic and cultural sociologist. Accordingly, my research combines economic sociology and management scholarship by showing how market actors that rely on connection-based activities to gain audience support can use relational work as a performance-enhancing strategy. Relational work refers to the process through which people balance their economic activities with the social ties that are intertwined with those activities, and the goal is to successfully complete economic endeavors while sustaining intimate social relationships. Examples from my research include content creators who build close relationships with their audiences while gaining economic rewards from those relationships and grandmothers who are paid to care for their own grandchildren. Relational work is the primary theoretical lens of my research, but I also explore topics such as authenticity, evaluations, and inequality. I use a broad range of quantitative and qualitative methods, including text analysis, interviews, surveys, and experiments. Currently, my main method of choice is to use large language models to scale up traditional qualitative content analysis for use on massive amounts of text data, then analyze the resulting measures quantitatively.

Most of my current projects are set in the context of BookTube, or the corner of YouTube where creators post book-related content. For my dissertation, I built a novel dataset of channel, video, and comment-level data for 980 English-speaking BookTubers. I have projects that use this context to explore the potential of relational work as a strategy to gain audience support, how relational work can amplify cancel culture (with Brayden G. King), and the effects of social movements (i.e., #BLM2020) on relational work outcomes. I am also working with Phillipa Chong on an exploration of the new evaluative landscape of books, combining our research on professional book critics and book influencers. Branching out slightly from BookTubers, I am designing experiments with Oliver Hahl in which we seek to unpack the mechanisms through which creators' relational work, status, and authenticity shape their performance. While my projects center on the world of content creators, I find that the insights from my research are applicable to entrepreneurs, activists, executives, professionals, and artists — basically anybody in the modern world that engage in connection-based market activities with heterogeneous audiences and seek audience support. To this end, I am also the lead author on a theory paper by the Creator Economy Working Group (a group of junior management scholars that studies the creator economy) that seeks to develop theoretical lenses through which management scholarship can approach the study of content creators.

Outside of my obsession with relational work, authenticity, and culture, I enjoy following Korean pop culture (currently stanning AllDay Project), reading (hence the choice of BookTube as a context), playing tennis, taking walks in nature, and ballet. I juggle these interests with answering 5,000 questions a day from my elementary school-aged child and sitting in ice rinks at unreasonably early hours while he does his figure skating training.