The Questions Behind My Work
I am drawn to difficult questions about human behavior—especially the ones that have consequences far beyond the classroom or the pages of an academic journal.
Why do people offend? What can patterns of behavior tell us about the person behind them? How do investigators make sense of incomplete or conflicting evidence? What happens when assumptions, decisions, or systems go wrong? How does technology change the ways people can harm, control, or exploit one another? And, most importantly, how can psychological science help us respond better?
Those questions have taken my work across investigative psychology, technology-facilitated sexual violence, wrongful convictions, offender behavior, victimization, and criminal justice decision-making. They may look like different areas of research, but for me they are connected by the same underlying purpose: using psychology to better understand complex behavior and then asking what that understanding can actually help us do.
I do not see research as something that should end with a publication. I am most interested in what happens next—how evidence can inform investigations, professional judgment, prevention, policy, education, victim responses, and the systems in which consequential decisions are made.
That applied dimension is also what makes this work deeply meaningful to me. I genuinely love what I do, and I believe psychology has enormous potential not only to explain human behavior, but to improve people’s lives and help create more thoughtful, effective, and just systems.
