PRACTITIONER INTERESTS
ADMINISTRATIVE LEADERSHIP
My professional practice is grounded in administrative leadership across complex, highly regulated public-sector institutions. I have served in executive and senior leadership roles spanning municipal government, school district administration, statewide labor governance, and district-level academic programming, with responsibilities that have included board governance, policy development, organizational restructuring, stakeholder engagement, compliance, and strategic planning.
In school district leadership, I chaired board policy committees, led central-office reorganization work, supported governance modernization, and aligned administrative systems with instructional, operational, and legal requirements. As Executive Director of AFT Pennsylvania, I led statewide operations for a labor organization supporting more than 36,000 members across 60 affiliates. As a Senior Employee & Labor Relations Specialist with the City of Philadelphia, I now work within one of the nation’s largest public-sector employers, where labor, law, policy, workforce systems, and public accountability intersect.
HUMAN RESOURCES & FINANCE
My HR and finance practice focuses on the relationship between people systems, labor strategy, fiscal stewardship, and organizational risk. Across municipal government and public education, I have worked on employee and labor relations, collective bargaining, grievance resolution, workplace investigations, compensation design, benefits administration, policy compliance, and workforce analytics. This work reflects a consistent professional emphasis on building employment systems that are legally defensible, financially sustainable, and operationally coherent.
As the Director of Human Resources at the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District and the Southern Lehigh School District, I prepared and managed personnel budgets representing the majority of district expenditures, authored compensation plans for non-represented employees, supported collective bargaining strategy through proposal costing and long-term labor-cost modeling, and built position-control systems integrating staffing, credentials, compensation, benefits, and assignment data. At AFT Pennsylvania, I restructured a $2.5 million organizational budget, developed data dashboards for affiliate decision-making, and modernized HR, finance, and operational systems to strengthen organizational resilience.
CURRICULUM & INSTRUCTION
Teaching and learning remain central to my professional identity, beginning with my early work as a biology teacher and continuing through district-level STEM leadership, graduate instruction, and educator development. My classroom experience as a Biology Teacher at the Charter High School for Architecture & Design, a Philadelphia Title I public school and, and as a Biology Teacher at The Agnes Irwin School, an all-girls independent school, shaped my understanding of how instructional quality, expectations, resources, and institutional context interact to influence student opportunity.
Furthermore, as Assistant Director of STEM Academies for the School District of Philadelphia, I helped design a districtwide STEM initiative across 12 pilot schools and supported the development of academic programming in a large urban system. More recently, as an Adjunct Professor of Educational Leadership at Temple University, I have taught graduate courses in school reform, urban education policy, education policy analysis, and statistics and research. Across these roles, my teaching practice has emphasized evidence-based instruction, policy literacy, leadership development, and the translation of research into usable professional judgment.
SCHOLARLY INTERESTS
QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS
My research agenda is grounded in quantitative methods, with particular attention to how institutional structures shape educational outcomes over time. I use multilevel modeling, longitudinal and survival analysis, structural equation modeling, and large-scale administrative datasets to examine how policy choices, resource allocation, and organizational constraints influence behavior within education systems.
As a Research Assistant in Temple University’s General Education Program, I analyzed population-level administrative data to study class size, grading patterns, course sequencing, pedagogy, and student outcomes. This work strengthened my ability to translate complex statistical findings into policy-relevant insights while maintaining methodological rigor, particularly in settings where institutional leaders must make decisions with imperfect but consequential data.
EDUCATION ECONOMICS & FINANCE
My scholarship also centers on education economics, school finance, and labor markets, with particular attention to workforce stability, compensation systems, and district-level spending decisions. My doctoral dissertation examined how compensation levels and auxiliary spending influenced teacher retention across Pennsylvania, using population-level administrative data and Cox proportional hazards survival models to estimate how fiscal investments shaped the risk of turnover over time.
Rather than treating teacher mobility as a purely individual labor-market choice, my work frames retention as an institutional and policy-mediated phenomenon. By examining differences across region, experience level, district context, Title I status, and high-need subject areas, I use education finance as a lens for understanding how public institutions structure opportunity, stability, and organizational capacity.
POLICY ANALYSIS & APPLICATION
A defining feature of my scholarship is its emphasis on policy implementation and institutional design. I am interested not only in whether policies work, but in how they are enacted, constrained, interpreted, and reshaped by the organizations responsible for carrying them out. Across research, public scholarship, and graduate teaching, my work bridges empirical analysis, governance, law, and professional practice.
My published and applied research has examined questions such as class size, student achievement, teacher decision-making, instructional quality, and institutional accountability. In this work, I approach policy as both an empirical and organizational problem: one that requires attention to evidence, incentives, professional behavior, legal constraints, and the practical conditions under which schools and universities operate.