I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab in Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management (2023-2025). 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.

My research combines economic sociology and management scholarship by showing how relational work can be a performance-enhancing strategy for economic actors that depend on audience support. 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 social media influencers 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, inequality, status, and evaluations in conjunction with relational work. I use a broad range of quantitative and qualitative methods, including text analysis, interviews, surveys, and experiments.

Most of my current projects are set in the context of BookTube, or the corner of YouTube where influencers post book-related content. For my dissertation, I built a novel dataset of channel, video, and comment-level data for 1,167 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 influencer relational work and authenticity shape their performance. While my projects center on the world of social media influencers, I find that the insights from my research are applicable to entrepreneurs, activists, executives, professionals, and artists – basically anybody in the modern world that would benefit from audience support!

Outside of my obsession with relational work and authenticity, I also enjoy Korean pop culture, reading, knitting, baking, nature walks, and ballet. I juggle these interests with answering 5,000 questions a day from my kindergartener and accompanying him on his various adventures.