I’m a historian of the 20th-century United States and an Assistant Professor at Santa Clara University. My work is shaped by a deep commitment to understanding how race, ethnicity, and gender shape migration and diasporic communities. I began my intellectual journey at Antelope Valley College, a community college in Lancaster, CA where I grew up. I took classes part-time for several years while working as a licensed esthetician and raising a family. In 2008, I completed an Associate of Arts degree, becoming the first in my family to earn a college degree. I transferred to the University of California, Berkeley and earned a B.A. in history. I then moved to Chicago where I completed a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago. 

In my last year of dissertation writing I was a pre-doctoral fellow at MIT. The following year, I spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Before landing a job at Santa Clara University, I worked for an executive search firm based in Boston.

My first book, Picture Bride, War Bride: The Role of Marriage in Shaping Japanese America won the 2024 Organization of American Historians Mary Nickliss Prize for "the most original book by an academic historian in the field of US women's and/or gender history."