I am a candidate for a Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Sociology at Duke University in Durham, NC. My research is motivated by how religion relates to stratification outcomes and to broader social change. Presently, I am studying religious organizational change; religion, gender and stratification; cross-national patterns of affiliation and participation; immigration’s effects on religiosity; and the role of the media in shaping public discourse about religious institutions. As a quantitative sociologist, I am keenly interested in finding ways to leverage advanced statistical methods to more accurately model social processes.
My dissertation, entitled The Social Fabrication of Protestant Megachurches is being supervised by Mark Chaves (chair), Lisa Keister, Jen'nan Read, and Grant Wacker (Religion). It explores the causes and consequences of a major trend in the organization of American religion, namely, the concentration of people into very large churches.
Other work examines new applications of Bayesian methods to detect significant differences in small population sub-groups, assessing the evidence for the emergence of a distinct form of Hispanic religiosity, modeling religion using Bayesian techniques, and assessing change in rates of religious attendance in Canada. I have training in survey design, interviewing, Bayesian statistical methods, spatial statistics and R.
I am a visiting instructor in Sociology at Kings University in Edmonton, Alberta, where I teach the sociology of deviance, the sociology of gender, the sociology of religion, and introductory sociology.
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