I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois Chicago. My work as an ethnographer examines race relations in the South Side of Chicago. For the last three years, I have examined the interracial politics of Black and Asian Americans through participant observations, archival work, and interviews in Chicago’s historic Chinatown and Bronzeville neighborhoods. Through an intersectional lens (race, class, gender, and religion), I uncover the conditions that hinder or enable conflictual, neutral, and collaborative inter-minority relations across varied organizational contexts. My research has been supported by several competitive grants from the American Sociological Association (ASA DDRIG), Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy. 

Another major focus of work examines religion as a case to examine racial formation processes. I have published two articles (Journal of Scientific Studies of Religion and Political Theology [forthcoming]) and two book chapters (Taylor and Francis and Oxford University Press). One of the book chapters includes a co-authored piece with Michael Emerson and Christian Smith in their landmark book Divided by Faith: the Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (25th anniversary edition), where we analyze and forecast the trajectory of race and religion in America. 

When I am not researching, I am probably cooking, trying to make my nephews and nieces smile, or fishing in front of the Chicago skyline. Chicago Sun Times once covered my tales of urban fishing.