After graduating from EKU in 2022, I moved back to Louisville, Kentucky, and decided to take a year to really decide what my next move would be in terms of a career path. During that year break, I decided to pursue graduate education and was accepted to the Applied Sociology graduate program at the University of Louisville in 2023. I recently defended my master’s thesis, titled “No One Leaves for Free: A Media Analysis of the Lived Experiences and Cumulative Impacts of the Flint Water Crisis,” and am now completing my first semester of the Ph.D. in Applied Sociology at UofL.
During my time in the master’s program at UofL, I served as a graduate research assistant for the Community Engagement Core of the University of Louisville Superfund Research Center, which aims to support transdisciplinary research. The center incorporates best practices in community engagement by facilitating beneficial interactions between residents, industry, policy makers and Superfund Center investigators, helping all invested parties collaboratively understand, reduce exposure to and address the negative impacts of contaminants from Superfund sites and other sites impacted by hazardous waste.
I also had the privilege of co-authoring a paper this past year with Latrica Best, Ph.D. (Boston College) and Lauren Heberle, Ph.D. (University of Louisville), titled “The Burden of Racialized Time: Exploring Cumulative Impacts Using an Intergenerational Environmental Justice Framework,” which will be published in an upcoming special edition of Environmental Justice. I presented this research with my co-authors at the 2025 Eastern Sociological Society Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, and the 2025 American Sociological Association Conference in Chicago, Illinois.
