I received my PhD in Sociology from Indiana University at Bloomington, where I conducted my dissertation research on interpersonal emotion management in support groups for divorce and bereavement. I subsequently spent two years as a post doctoral fellow in Mental Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I spent over ten in the School of Social Welfare in the Stony Brook University Health Sciences Center, before moving to Cleveland and taking a position with the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University. I spent three years there doing psychosocial cancer research out of the MetroHealth Medical Center, where I still retain Bioscientific Staff status. I have been in my current position here at Cleveland State University since 2011.

My primary research areas are the sociology of emotions, social psychology and the sociology of health and mental health. My particular interests focus on patient-provider interaction, stress and coping, health inequities, caregiving, and emotions in health care. In recent years I have explored these topics in two main projects. The first investigates end-of-life cancer caregiving and bereavement, especially among socioeconomically-disadvantaged caregivers, considering burden, well-being, and grief. The second focuses on applying sociological insights into human behavior to develop an artificially intelligent application to support interaction between caregivers and people with dementia.