Graduate College

I am a Registered Dietitian and an Assistant Professor of Public Health Nutrition in the Department of Nutritional Sciences at Oklahoma State University. I am originally from Pittsburgh, PA, where I did my BS and MS/DI at the University of Pittsburgh in Clinical Dietetics and Nutrition. After graduation, I spent 9 years moving around the country with my husband for his active duty Army service working in a variety of settings from in-patient clinical and out-patient eating disorder treatment to home health and childcare menu development.

Research Interests:

My area of expertise lies in assessing how healthy the diet is, or dietary quality, and in designing programs to improve dietary quality of large groups of people. I focus currently on improving dietary quality through school nutrition and with tactical athletes, including firefighters, police officers, and military personnel and their families. For the latter, I am co-director of the OSU Tactical Fitness and Nutrition Lab. TFAN's mission is to improve the health, fitness, and occupational performance of tactical athletes through education, research, and outreach.

I am a cultural historical geography, specializing in critically examining public spaces. My scholarship is based in qualitative inquiry and informed by a range of theoretical perspectives including, for example, feminism (especially performativity and intersectionality), actor network theory, and critical race theory. Most of my work has centered on New Orleans's public spaces, where I have explored, for example, identity, inclusion and exclusion, homelessness, and increasingly memorialization, particularly concerning impacts and opportunities related to minority and underrepresented groups.

Recently, I have examined Confederate monument removal as well as ideas of regenerative memorialization. I will expand this research trajectory, concerning memory-work, in the U.S. South, particularly relating to regenerative memorialization, gender, and public spaces.

As a teacher-scholar, I work to engage students through a variety methods (e.g. discussion, expository essays, storytelling, spoken word, lectures) and media (e.g. documentaries, song, podcasts, TedTalks, popular books) of diverse sociocultural geographies, incorporating my own research when appropriate. My teaching fosters student development in critical thinking and spatial skills that may be applied to their personal and professional lives.

As a mentor to graduate students, I work closely with students as they develop and conduct their research projects, including sharpening their methodological, theoretical, and writing skills.

Research Interests:

Cultural Geography
Historical Geography
Homelessness/Identity
Memorialization
Tourism/Public Spaces