I am a sixth-year PhD candidate in Anthropology and an MPH student in Epidemiology at Northwestern University, supported by an NIH F31 Predoctoral Fellowship from the National Institute on Aging and a previous National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP). I will complete both degrees in spring 2026.
My research integrates biomarkers of aging—especially epigenetic clocks—with causal inference methods and ecosocial theory to understand how social and environmental conditions become embodied across the life course. I am also interested in applying and translating causal inference frameworks from biostatistics, econometrics, and epidemiology to questions in biological anthropology and demography.
Drawing on the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey (CLHNS) and Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in the Philippines, my dissertation examines how political, environmental, and institutional disruptions shape human development and health across the life course.
This study leverages a natural experiment to examine how the 1983 Philippine political–economic crisis became biologically embedded across the life course. Drawing on the overlap between the crisis and the enrollment of pregnant mothers in the CLHNS birth cohort study, I test how the timing and intensity of prenatal stress shape development and midlife biology. Individuals with any prenatal signal of crisis—compared with those first exposed only after birth—had smaller birth size and earlier puberty but slower midlife epigenetic aging and lower obesity risk. While having any prenatal signal was beneficial in the long run relative to no prenatal signal, within the prenatally exposed, earlier and more severe gestational exposure predicted a faster pace of biological aging, indicating lasting costs of higher-intensity prenatal stress.
This project examines how climate disasters translate into mental and biological distress. In the wake of Typhoon Odette’s 2021 destruction, this study documents how typhoon housing damage was associated with water insecurity experiences, psychological distress, and epigenetic aging measured one year later among the CLHNS birth cohort. Housing damage and water insecurity were correlated with worse mental health for all participants, but accelerated epigenetic aging appeared primarily among women—suggesting gendered disparities in the embodied toll of climate shocks.
This study considers institutional reform as a protective shock that redistributes the social resources buffering women from violence. Leveraging the 1988 Free Public Secondary Education Act, which eliminated tuition fees for public secondary schools, I use instrumental variables methods with national DHS data to assess whether expanded schooling reduced women’s lifetime risk of intimate partner violence. Among rural women, each additional year of schooling lowered IPV risk by roughly four percentage points, largely by delaying union formation and enabling more-educated partner selection.
This study used Bayesian multilevel regression with poststratification to analyze data from a 2020 community antibody survey and estimate neighborhood-level infection risk prior to vaccine rollout. Population estimates from the American Community Survey were used for poststratification, and racialized economic segregation was measured using an Index of Concentration at the Extremes (ICE) for race, ethnicity, and income, capturing the spatial polarization of advantage and disadvantage across the city. While the raw seroprevalence data erroneously suggested that exposure burdens were similar across Chicago neighborhoods, adjusted estimates revealed pronounced disparities, with higher infection risk in poorer, predominantly Black neighborhoods and lower risk in wealthier, predominantly white areas. The findings demonstrate how serological data and careful modeling to mitigate sampling bias can uncover inequities in infection exposure that routine surveillance based on case counts and hospitalizations cannot reveal.
You can view my CV (with links to my publications) here.